(Note: A specific plot detail about Netflix’s Always Be My Maybe is below, so if you don’t want to be spoiled, please move along.)
Always Be My Maybe is a fun way to kick off your summer rom-com viewing. But about halfway through the Netflix film, a surprise cameo kicks the movie into the next level. If you’ve seen the trailer, you know that Keanu Reeves shows up as a rival to Marcus (Randall Park) for the affections of Sasha (Ali Wong). Which is awesome, because Reeves’ comedic roles, as it turns out, are much too rare. But what makes the star’s entrance into the movie even more dramatic is the fact that he’s playing himself.
Granted, it’s a heightened, poking-fun version of himself, as Vulture explains (ABMM’s Keanu, for example, says that his high school crush was “Mother Teresa”). As Reeves went to the Chateau Marmont to meet with Wong and director Nahnatchka Khan to discuss the role, “Keanu Reeves’s entrance played out exactly like his eventual introduction in Always Be My Maybe: He floated in like a goddamned movie star.”
That entrance was only enhanced in the movie itself, as Reeves strolls into an upscale restaurant in slo-mo, wearing an all-black Tom Ford suit, blowing kisses to Sasha, while turning around to do a quick glad-hand greeting to an admirer. It’s an epic cinematic entrance on par with Rita Hayworth’s in Gilda, although on a much funnier level.