It was 90 degrees in Beverly Hills, but Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder were wearing head-to-toe black—looking as though they had just teleported onto the cream-colored Four Seasons couch from somewhere colder, darker, and significantly less August. Reeves wore a black blazer and his signature shoulder-length tresses. Ryder had layered a tuxedo jacket over a graphic T-shirt—looking less Stranger Things mom than Veronica Sawyer all grown-up. When a publicist led me into the room where they were sitting, afternoon sun beating in from a floor-to-ceiling window, my first inclination was to draw the blinds and shield these beloved goth-ish stars of the 90s from the light.
Reeves and Ryder, both a little removed from their teen idol days but still plenty productive, have of late teamed up for an unlikely collaboration—a romantic comedy called Destination Wedding that will open August 31. Though the actors aren’t Hollywood’s usual rom-com types—the contradictory circumstances of their latest film make sense in a space-time continuum-defying sort of way. Reeves and Ryder starred in another kind of destination wedding 26 years ago—when their characters married in Romania during the filming 1992’s Dracula. (Ryder has said that she and Reeves might actually be married because of the ceremony, which was officiated by “a real Romanian priest.”) When Ryder received the script for this Destination Wedding, from writer and director Victor Levin, she knew she wanted Reeves to play her romantic partner again.
“I just love being together with him so much,” Ryder said in that incongruously sunny hotel room. Turning to Reeves, she continued: “My love for you . . .”
“. . . and my love for you,” Reeves returned, looking at Ryder adoringly.
“I’ve had it forever, but now people are finally seeing it. Even though we’re in character,” said Ryder.
When they first met two decades ago, both actors were on the white-hot upswing of their careers. Ryder already had Beetlejuice, Heathers, and Edward Scissorhands under her belt, while Reeves had appeared in My Own Private Idaho, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, and Point Break. Ryder fondly remembered an entire month spent rehearsing the Francis Ford Coppola period drama at the filmmaker’s vineyard in Napa. Reeves was quick to point out that Ryder was a principal, playing opposite Gary Oldman’s title character, while he was merely a supporting player.
“You were pretty much in Dracula land,” Reeves said to Ryder. “You and Gary were all doing your thing. I was Jonathan Harker, all in the background . . . I had like one scene.”
“No,” Ryder interrupted, refusing to let Reeves diminish his importance to her Dracula experience. In fact, while moving houses recently, Ryder discovered proof of her co-star’s meaningful contribution all of those years ago.
“I’m one of those people who is bad at moving,” explained Ryder. “My dad is an archivist, and I have that same hoarder-archivist habit. I save everything, but I have these journals, and I just pulled one out recently, and it was from around the time of Dracula.” The text: “angst, angst, angst, angst, thank God for Keanu. Thank God I’m going to see Keanu.”
“I was always just so happy when you were around because there was so much, sort of, trauma,” said Ryder. (Coppola has said that Ryder and Oldman fell out while filming: “One day they [. . .] absolutely didn’t get along. None of us were privy to what had happened.” Ryder has said of Oldman’s Method technique: “Maybe it’s his way of working, but I felt there was a danger [while filming].”)
“You were working hard,” Reeves assured Ryder. “I’m ‘no muss, no fuss.’ I’m just”—here, he embodied the physicality of someone even more at ease than he had been just a moment ago, which was more chill than you could be in eight Dracula lifetimes—“‘It’s great.’”
“It’s like what Katharine Hepburn said about Spencer Tracy,” said Ryder, seemingly referring to Reeves’s laid-back acting approach. “‘There’s no embroidery. He just does it.’ Which is so great. A lot of people embroider a lot.”
“I know, but there’s some beautiful embroidery,” offered Reeves.
Another thing Ryder learned about herself by reading through her diaries recently: “I clearly only [journal] when I’m depressed, because there’s never any, ‘I had a great day’ entries. When you look back, you’re like, ‘God, what was wrong with me when I was that age?’”
“That’s what art is about,” Reeves deadpanned.
Alas, Reeves doesn’t journal. But he does write notes to friends.
“We wrote each other a couple letters, too,” Ryder said, turning to her co-star. “You were one of two people who were still writing letters when e-mail started to happen. You and Daniel Day-Lewis were the only two people whom I get physical letters from. It was so nice. People just don’t do that anymore.”
