Keanu Reeves “did his homework” on Shadow the Hedgehog, says film director

There were rumblings for a number of months that Keanu Reeves was going to be portraying Shadow the Hedgehog in the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Turns out those rumors were true and then some, as Reeves not only is playing Shadow in the feature film, but he also voiced the character in DLC for SONIC X SHADOW GENERATIONS.

While plenty of actors take the reigns of iconic characters without knowing too much of their backstory, that’s apparently not the case for Keanu. In a fan interview with Sonic movie director Jeff Fowler, we learned that not only was Keanu passionate about the role, he also made sure to put in time learning about the character before diving in.

**“It’s so awesome that we got Keanu Reeves to voice the character, and he was so fantastic to work with. I think he thinks the character is awesome. I think he definitely understood what we were going for and was very excited to kinda do his version of it, but he, like all the cast, really wants to get it right, really cares.

He would give us so many different versions of line readings and just wanna keep going. He was not just sort of showing up and just reading the script into a microphone. Like he really wanted to create a very fan-faithful version of the character. He did research. In our first meeting, he very clearly had gone and done his homework, which was awesome.

And so, I just can’t say enough wonderful things about Keanu and what he brought to the character, and just the experience of making this movie.” – Jeff Fowler, Director**