Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter Get Existential Discussing Broadway's Waiting for Godot

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter have spent a lot of time pondering the notion and nature of waiting recently.

“There’s a lot of kinds of waiting,” Reeves reflected while in conversation with Broadway.com.

“Existential waiting?” Winter offered. “Waiting for a sign of meaning. Waiting for hope.”

For Reeves and Winter, a considerable wait is now over. Waiting for Godot began performances at the Hudson Theatre on September 13, with opening night on September 28. But the pair first discussed partnering up to play Vladimir and Estragon three and a half years ago, shortly after reuniting for a third Bill and Ted movie. The Broadway production's director, Jamie Lloyd, was on board soon after.

For the past year, the pair have immersed themselves in an impressive amount of preparation: Visiting the Samuel Beckett Collection at the University of Reading in England, getting together for monthly readings, asking other Godot actors for tips. One such pairing was Rainn Wilson and Aasif Mandvi, who starred in Los Angeles' Geffen Playhouse production of the play last year. As Reeves pointed out with affection, Winter also dove into physical training and devoured a hefty Samuel Beckett biography.

“We had the ability to marinate in this,” Winter said. “It was a gift because things in our business move so fast and this play is challenging. I personally am very grateful that we’ve had time to wrap our brains around it.”

After all of that marinating, one of Reeves and Winter’s essential tasks as performers has arguably required little effort: generating chemistry together on stage. As longtime friends and collaborators, it’s something they can’t help but do. For audiences, an undeniable part of the excitement and appeal of the show will be to see Reeves and Winter essentially hanging out together. It’s what has turned this production of Waiting for Godot—one of theater’s notorious non-events—into a major event this season.

“I just gave up on that separation [between actor and character] completely,” said Winter. “I mean, it’s just us. It’s just us. We are Vladimir and Estragon.”

Asked what he’s most looking forward to about bringing Waiting for Godot to Broadway, Reeves turned to look appreciatively at Winter, something that happens frequently in their interviews together. "To do it with you, man."

As a director, Lloyd insists that his actors bring plenty of themselves into their performances. Nicole Scherzinger's soul-baring turn as Norma Desmond in the director's stripped-down Sunset Boulevard speaks to that approach. “We don’t ask them to put on a costume and pretend to be someone else," Lloyd said. "We’re actually asking them to find the characters within themselves.” 

Lloyd was immediately sold on the idea of a Keanu Reeves/Alex Winter Godot, thinking about what the Bill and Ted duo would bring to the parts. “It instantly made sense to me, even before I’d met them, just thinking about their friendship. They’ve been friends for 30 plus years. And for me, the play is very much about… I mean, obviously it’s literally about 200,000 things. All of human existence is in this play. But at its center, at its heart, it’s about friendship.”

“They have this very beautiful friendship that’s so lovely to see in rehearsal. The care, the tenderness, the love that they have for each other," he continued. "All of that is just informing the production in a whole new way.”

Among other things, the play is “about companionship and about how we seek solace in companionship,” said Lloyd, and “how that friendship can sustain us in the face of something very challenging. Connection, even with just one other person, can give us great hope.”

As with Sunset Boulevard, Lloyd’s intention with Godot, he explained, was to “reset” the play, along with audience expectations. This production of Waiting for Godot looks like no other. Where Beckett’s text calls for a country road and a single tree, Soutra Gilmour’s scenic design consists of a gigantic, hollow tube that extends downstage, away from the audience, towards an endless nothingness.

“When the lights come up, it's buckle up," said Reeves, using a phrase that has never been used about Waiting for Godot ever.

The meaning of Gilmour's striking, sci-fi-esque stage imagery—much like the meaning of the play itself—is open to interpretation. “No one solution is the correct one,” said Lloyd. “No one interpretation is the absolute, correct one. That’s the joy of it—that we all will come to the play, bring ourselves to the play. And if we come with an open heart and an open mind, there’s a kind of joy in allowing yourself to think, 'Oh, well, I think it means this'—and it’ll be completely different to someone sat next to you. That’s the exciting thing. That’s what give it purpose.”

Alongside Reeves and Winter, Brandon J. Dirden plays Pozzo while Michael Patrick Thornton plays Lucky. By grim coincidence, both actors became attached to the production in the wake of personal grief. Dirden first read the audition notice during a flight back to his hometown to attend his father’s funeral. “I just didn’t have the headspace or the bandwidth [to think about the play],” Dirden said, “until I was reminded that my father, who was an academic amateur actor—he loved it. This was one of his favorite plays.” In 1970, Dirden’s father even performed in a community theater production of Godot in the role of Pozzo. “There were some signs and breadcrumbs along the way, like, 'you should probably do this.'"

Thornton, whose father also passed away earlier this year, had been thinking about Godot in the lead-up. “I had, weirdly, for whatever reason, while visiting my dad in assisted living, found myself dipping back into Beckett. Just reading some things to kind of work up the courage to go into these environments that are hellscapes of memory.” When he heard about the show, Thornton wrote Lloyd an email expressing how "personal and urgent" the material felt to him. He got the part.

The inherent mystery of the characters of Pozzo and Lucky mean the roles are opportunities for intense self-exploration. “What this play gives me an opportunity to do is to learn more about myself than even I knew,” said Dirden. “Great plays do that because they demand that you reveal those things that sometimes you are even afraid or in denial about. And so I’m learning so much more about who I am through trying to approach and trying to be truthful to who Pozzo is."

Thornton agreed. “We get the thing from the playwright. We try to figure it out and lend our soul to it in rehearsal. And then we hand it off at curtain call, and it’s yours.”