Keanu Reeves Includes This Clause In All His Contracts: 'It's Frustrating'

There are a handful of celebs who utilize specific clauses in their contracts for movies that they work on, and Keanu Reeves is no different.

The 58-year-old Matrix actor recently spoke with Variety, revealing that the rumors of him having a no digital editing clause are very much true – and there’s a reason.

Keep reading to find out more…

Keanu explained that he adopted the no digital edits clause after his role was altered in a way that he wasn’t comfortable with.

“I don’t mind if someone takes a blink out during an edit, but early on, in the early 2000s, or it might have been the ’90s, I had a performance changed,” he shared, saying that a tear was added to his face.

Keanu adds, “I was just like, ‘Huh?!’ It was like, I don’t even have to be here.”

“What’s frustrating about that is you lose your agency,” he went on, referencing deepfakes and AI. “When you give a performance in a film, you know you’re going to be edited, but you’re participating in that. If you go into deepfake land, it has none of your points of view. That’s scary. It’s going to be interesting to see how humans deal with these technologies. They’re having such cultural, sociological impacts, and the species is being studied. There’s so much ‘data’ on behaviors now.”

Keanu continued on, saying that it was a conversation about reality versus technology that put things in perspective.

“People are growing up with these tools: We’re listening to music already that’s made by AI in the style of Nirvana, there’s NFT digital art,” he said. “It’s cool, like, Look what the cute machines can make! But there’s a corporatocracy behind it that’s looking to control those things. Culturally, socially, we’re gonna be confronted by the value of real, or the non-value. And then what’s going to be pushed on us? What’s going to be presented to us?”

Keanu concluded, “It’s this sensorium. It’s spectacle. And it’s a system of control and manipulation. We’re on our knees looking at cave walls and seeing the projections, and we’re not having the chance to look behind us.”

Lauren Graham, Queen Latifah, and many more also have contract clauses.