Keanu Reeves rarely malfunctions. Nearly any interview he does reveals as much. After four decades in Hollywood playing versions of the same fundamentally decent dude-in-crisis, he’s learned to stay in his cyberpunk philosopher/surfing FBI agent/action hero lane. In person, he’s pleasant and playful, but he also holds back, calibrating his remarks just so. Is this why we like him so much? We don’t know who Keanu Reeves is, not really, but maybe we don’t want to know. Or maybe this is all there is to know. He’s a cipher onto whom we can project our own ideas, desires, and hopes for humanity.

So when Reeves, sitting with me in a cavernous studio in West Hollywood, ventures a feisty opinion about the latest advance in artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, I perk up. ​​The question is whether a bot could conduct this conversation one day. While I, the human interviewer, am not so concerned this will happen in my lifetime, Reeves looks me dead in the eye and says, “Oh no, you should be worried about that happening next month.” Very Gen X of him, I think at first, but then I remember: This is a man known for leading the revolution in the war against the machines. Reeves obviously isn’t the characters he plays, but when Neo tells you the agents are coming, your instincts say, Run.

Not that Reeves is fighting many machines these days. For the past few years, he’s been shooting up human baddies in the John Wick franchise, the fourth installment of which hits theaters in March. Reeves plays a hit man, out of retirement, bathed in ultraviolet lighting and battling an entire underworld of crime syndicates, all to avenge the death of his puppy. But the films are still an argument against machine-made anything. John Wick: Chapter 4 director Chad Stahelski served as Reeves’ stunt double in the Matrix movies—that’s him in The Matrix Resurrections as “Chad,” the guy who took Neo’s place by Trinity’s side—and he’s adamant about capturing as much flesh-and-blood action as possible. “We’re not anti-VFX,” he says, seated on a couch next to Reeves. “Our problem comes when you use it in place of being creative.” Perhaps that’s one of the lessons you learn after working on four Matrix movies: Computers can’t fix bad ideas.

While Stahelski and Reeves are off posing for photos for this story, a tweet flashes across my phone. It’s a writer saying that one of his clients no longer wants to pay him for his work—because an AI will do it for free. (The client will pay a cheaper rate for him to clean up the AI’s copy, if he wants.) When the shoot wraps, I pull Reeves aside and tell him about the tweet. He’s probably right about the bots, I say. I attempt a joke, but he doesn’t laugh. He gives me a thoughtful look, and then he gets explicit: Corporations don’t care about paying artists. Well, what he actually says is this: “They don’t give a fuck.” It’s a startling moment coming from Reeves, the most pointed and serious I’ve seen him all day. Corporations might not care, but he clearly does. That’s one thing we can say about Keanu Reeves: In a world of fakes and frauds, he’s fighting for what’s real.

WIRED: I have to know, Chad, what was it like to play “Chad” in The Matrix Resurrections?

Chad Stahelski: Oh my God. I will tell you, that was not my best day.