Keanu Reeves Wrote a Book. A Really Weird One.

Keanu Reeves doesn’t know exactly where the idea came from, but one day — sometime around the release of “John Wick: Chapter 2,” starring Keanu Reeves, and before he started shooting “The Matrix Resurrections,” also starring Keanu Reeves — he imagined a man who couldn’t die.

“It became a series of what ifs,” he said. “What if they were 80,000 years old? Where did this character come from? What if they came from a tribe that was being attacked by other tribes and wanted to ask the gods for a weapon, and what if a god replied, and what if that birthed a half-human, half-god child?”

From there, Reeves added, “It went from this simple premise and gained in complexity and continued to grow.”

For a while, the character only existed in Reeves’s head. Then he wondered, What if this immortal warrior became the basis for a comic book? An action movie? An animated series?

“And then, there’s another what-if,” he said. “What if it became a novel?”

Reeves’s ancient warrior has since become the anchor of a growing multimedia franchise. The comic he imagined and co-wrote, BRZRKR (pronounced “berserker”), grew into a 12-issue series that has sold more than two million copies. A live-action film, starring and produced by Reeves, and an animated spinoff are in development at Netflix.

Panels from Reeves’s BRZRKR comic series, which has sold more than two million copies.Credit…Boom! Studios