Where Keanu Reeves got to play Hamlet
I spent a lot of time in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the 1990s. I remember the exact dates by looking up when Keanu Reeves was living there, rehearsing and performing Hamlet. I was one of the people waiting in the crowd outside the Manitoba Theatre, asking for an autograph, although I didn’t make it into the video below. Truly, I was there. I was working as an ethnographer for another sociologist who had research grants from the Canadian Forest Service in those days, and I am sure I didn’t work that day.
Anyway, there was a time in my life when I loved Winnipeg so much that I bought a last-minute Thanksgiving Day airline ticket out of Madison, Wisconsin, to spend American Thanksgiving there. It didn't matter what part of the bitter cold winter it was in Manitoba or how crazy my family and friends said I was for traveling there in winter. I just liked being there.
In November 2024, around thirty years later, I again made a hasty trip to Winnipeg over an American Thanksgiving weekend. And I am happy to report that right now in Winnipeg, there still exists the same buzz of understated cool I felt waiting for Keanu to emerge from the Manitoba Theatre in all his 90s beauty, thinking, "Yes, this makes perfect sense." This unexpected match of this Hollywood star and Shakespearean characters would be predictable only in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Winnipeg's architecture is locked in time—Victorian, Art Deco, Beaux-Arts, and Brutalist. Matthew Rankin’s stunning Universal Language (2024) captures this in his new film about a surreal interzone between Tehran and Winnipeg. In this simulacra, the lives of multiple characters cross paths in surprising ways. Two little kids, primary grade schoolers Negin and Nazgol, find some money frozen in the ice and try to claim it. Meanwhile, Massoud, a tour guide, leads a group of increasingly confused tourists through Winnipeg's neighborhoods—including my new neighborhood, the Exchange District. Another character, Matthew, quits his bureaucratic job in a Québecois government office and begins a long journey to visit his mother.
I feel much like Matthew these days—only my mom doesn’t live in Winnipeg. So, I plan to have her meet me there to visit my newly chosen home. Trains still rumble through my neighborhood as if they were the only mode of long-distance ground transportation. Canada’s Indigenous, Francophone, and immigrant communities have long settled alongside one another up and downriver from me to embrace the wintry streets. I think that in these times, in this world, it might be the only place for a Keanu fan like me.