Keanu Reeves Reflects on Starring With Shia LaBeouf and Tilda Swinton in ‘Constantine’ 15 Years Later

If you’ve been waiting 15 years to hear Keanu Reeves wax poetic about the mise en scène in Constantine, have we got a panel for you: On Saturday, Constantine’s star, director Francis Lawrence and producer Akiva Goldsman virtually reunited during Comic-Con@Home to look back at their 2005 comic book pic.
Reeves played DC Comics antihero John Constantine, an occult detective navigating a world of angels and demons while seeking salvation from eternal damnation. Even all these years later, he couldn’t contain his enthusiasm about the cast enlisted to co-star with him.
“Throwing down with Peter Stormare as I’m bleeding out and he’s leaning into me and lighting my cigarette. Or throwing down with Tilda Swinton as she’s choking me, [saying] ‘Hello, John,’ with her foot on my throat,” Reeves excitedly rattled off, the latter of whom plays the Archangel Gabriel.
“It was my second time working with [Rachel Weisz], so we had a shorthand,” he added. She plays an LAPD officer investigating a suicide, with Shia LaBeouf as Constantine’s mentee and Djimon Hounsou as witch doctor Papa Midnite. “Working with Shia LaBeouf and his dying scene. Working with Djimon Hounsou, I love that moment when he starts to pray and Constantine’s like, ‘Ugh’… The cast!”
Warner Bros. released Constantine the same year as Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. While the Dark Knight got his own trilogy, Constantine would not receive a sequel, though it ultimately would become a cult classic of the comic book genre. The filmmakers, however, hoped to continue the story.
“Boy, we wanted to. We wanted to make a hard R sequel. I think we’d probably make it tomorrow,” Goldsman said. “We’ve talked about it and we’ve had ideas” — one of which, he revealed, involved Constantine in a jail cell with Jesus Chris himself — but believe the studio always saw the property as “a little bit of a feathered fish.”
Watch the full “Constantine: 15th Anniversary Reunion” panel below.
RELATED CONTENT:
This video is unavailable because we were unable to load a message from our sponsors.
If you are using ad-blocking software, please disable it and reload the page.