Ana de Armas Deeply Regrets Telling Keanu Reeves This 1 Thing

Ana de Armas has nothing but wonderful things to say about Keanu Reeves, her co-star in Eli Roth’s Knock Knock and the upcoming John Wick spinoff Ballerina. But she admittedly embarrassed herself the first time she met the Hollywood superstar.

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On Thursday night, the 36-year-old actress was in Las Vegas to accept CinemaCon’s Action Star of the Year Award,” which she clearly felt she owed partly to her work with Reeves. As The Hollywood Reporter writers, she recalled the story of their first meeting more than a decade ago, when they co-starred in Eli Roth’s thriller Knock Knock.

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“I met him when I barely spoke English,” said the Oscar nominee. “I met Keanu for the first time in Santiago de Chile at lunch with the filmmakers of Knock Knock, our first movie together. We were sitting across from each other on the table, and I was really nervous, as you are when you’re in front of Keanu Reeves. I couldn’t talk to him much because I was so self-conscious about my English and I was really struggling and really trying hard to follow the conversation.”

In fact, she was trying so hard to follow along that she wasn’t sure what the group was talking about when they brought up Reeves’ role in The Matrix.

“He looked at me and asked me if I had seen it. And I was like, The Matrix? No,’” de Armas recounted. “Everyone at the table was shocked, so someone came to me and told me in Spanish. ‘You haven’t seen La Matrix?’ I was, like, oh La Matrix. Yeah, I have seen that one.”

While it would be easy to chalk that misunderstanding up to nerves and a title getting lost in translation, de Armas insists the moment “will never not be embarrassing.”

De Armas and Reeves will share the screen once again when Ballerina arrives in theaters on June 6, 2025.