Awww! Keanu Reeves has a girlfriend!
We’ve heard rumblings the past couple months the John Wick star was dating again after being photographed a few times recently looking quite cozy with his longtime collaborator Alexandra Grant.
The Los Angeles artist provided the visual art for Keanu’s books of poetry, Ode To Happiness (2011) and Shadows (2015). They created a publishing house together called X Artists’ Books.
Related: Keanu Returning For The Matrix 4!
Here’s some of Alexandra’s work, btw:
Very cool!
OK, so like we said, these two have been working together for over eight years; we know they’re friends. So when they were seen going to dinner a few times recently, even walking arm-in-arm, we couldn’t say definitively they were an item.
However, they destroyed any doubt by attending the LACMA Art + Film Gala at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art over the weekend — and holding hands on the red carpet!
The pics have really affected fans for two big reasons. The first, sadly, has to do with the way society treats women. To sum up:
While Keanu may look immortal, he’s actually 55 years old. (To quote Neo: Whoa!) Alexandra is 46, a totally reasonable, not at all controversial aged woman for a 55-year-old to be dating.
But of course we so often see rich and famous older men dating women decades younger it actually seems like a noteworthy outlier!
Sigh.
The second reason is a bit more poignant.
Can you remember the last time you saw news about who Keanu was dating? Think hard. Been a while, hasn’t it?
It isn’t just because the actor is intensely private, which is also true. It’s also because he hasn’t been in a relationship serious enough to take this step in 20 years! For real!
For those who don’t know, Keanu was in a very serious relationship in the late ’90s, meeting and falling in love with a personal assistant named Jennifer Syme while filming The Matrix. (No, she wasn’t Keanu’s assistant, she was David Lynch‘s — you can even see her onscreen in the film Lost Highway.)
They quickly got pregnant, but in 1999 tragedy struck when their daughter, Ava Archer Syme-Reeves, was stillborn at eight months. By all accounts the strain the loss put on the couple ended the relationship. Tragically, there was no time to reconcile. Just over a year after the breakup Jennifer was driving home from a party at Marilyn Manson‘s home and drove her Jeep into a row of parked cars. She was killed instantly.
Since then Keanu has mostly kept to himself.
It was very heavily rumored he and actress Claire Forlani, whom you might remember from Meet Joe Black, dated off and on from around 2003 to 2006.
However, even though they were photographed together many times, Keanu never confirmed the relationship.
There were a couple other brief rumored connections and flings as well, but nothing like this.
Alexandra is the first relationship in two decades Keanu has felt comfortable putting on the red carpet. And frankly, we could not be happier for him!
BTW, here are Keanu and Alexandra being adorable together during a book reading in 2016! Enjoy!
[Image via Adriana M. Barraza/WENN/Avalon.]
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