Ana de Armas Once Told Keanu Reeves She Hadn’t Seen ‘The Matrix’: “Will Never Not Be Embarrassing” (2025)

When Ana de Armas took center stage at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace on Thursday night to accept CinemaCon’s Action Star of the Year award, the Oscar nominated actress revealed that she had another action star on her mind: Keanu Reeves.

“I met him when I barely spoke English when I moved to L.A. 10 years ago,” said the actress in recalling the history of their relationship. “I met Keanu for the first time in Santiago de Chile at lunch with the filmmakers of Knock Knock, our first movie together. We were sitting across from each other on the table, and I was really nervous as you are when you’re in front of Keanu Reeves. I couldn’t talk to him much because I was so self-conscious about my English and I was really struggling and really trying hard to follow the conversation.”

Eli Roth directed the 2015 psychological thriller that cast Reeves as a devoted husband and father who helps two stranded young women when they turn up at his front door while his wife is away. The strangers turn out to be more than meets the eye as the story escalates into a deadly game. De Armas played one of the women.

Back to that dinner. The filmmakers were talking with Reeves about his career and the subject of his iconic action film The Matrix came up. “He looked at me and asked me if I had seen it. And I was like, ‘The Matrix? No.’ Everyone at the table was shocked, so someone came to me and told me in Spanish. ‘You haven’t seen La Matrix? I was, like, oh La Matrix. Yeah, I have seen that one. That will never not be embarrassing.”

The conversation continued to cover John Wick, the other action franchise Reeves helped popularize with his action stunts. “He got up from his chair and he started doing one of the choreographies, I believe it was the one in the bath house [in the first film]. He remembered how he killed every single man in that scene, and he did it for us. I was just staring at him. He was so happy and he was just so excited about this film he had just done, and it got me so excited.”

Fast forward 10 years, and de Armas found herself on the CinemaCon stage accepting the Action Star of the Year trophy during the closing night Big Screen Achievement Awards. The honor arrived as de Armas was making the rounds in Las Vegas to promote Ballerina, her upcoming spin-off of the John Wick franchise. Reeves even has a role in the Len Wiseman-directed film. “There wouldn’t be Ballerina without John Wick, and for sure there wouldn’t be John Wick without Keanu Reeves.”