Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves
(Photo by Emilio Madrid for Broadway.com)
Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are exhausted. The Bill & Ted duo, deep in preparations for Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot on Broadway under the direction of Jamie Lloyd, are finding themselves thoroughly depleted by the end of each rehearsal day.
“It’s like your brain is drained, your body is drained, your emotions are drained,” said Reeves, speaking to Broadway.com on a rare break from those exertions. “In a good way.”
It’s part of what you sign up for working on Beckett with a director like Lloyd, said Reeves: to be put through the intellectual, emotional and spiritual wringer. “The whole thing is, it has to be all of it, every show, all of it.”
Winter said he has been physically preparing for the role for three-and-a-half years—the amount of time since Reeves first pitched Winter the idea of doing the play together. “This is more about physical endurance than anything else,” he said. “I was lucky I came from a dance background, so I started doing that kind of stuff when I was very, very young. And I watch actors do it now, and often where they falter is not so much not getting their lines. It’s the physical prep and recovery that you need to do eight shows a week.”
Reeves said, of his friend and co-star’s Broadway regime, “This guy’s been like, ‘I’m in pilates, I’m training, I’m lifting weights, I’ve got the diet.’”
“It is a marathon,” Winter reasoned. “It’s a marathon every night.”
With performances set to begin at the Hudson Theatre on September 13, there’s one aspect of the show that Winter is feeling more relaxed about: getting into the characters of the tattered, perpetually waiting and put-upon buddies Vladimir and Estragon. There’s a simple reason for that. “It’s just us,” he said. “It’s just us … We are Vladimir and Estragon. We actually are Vladimir and Estragon.”