How Key and Peele convinced Keanu Reeves to voice the cat in Keanu

Keanu features a cat called (you guessed it) Keanu, and somehow the pair convinced Keanu Reeves himself to lend his vocal talents to the four-legged feline.

It wasn't a furry easy task getting the Matrix star on board at first though, as director Pete Atencio revealed to the Los Angeles Times.

Keanu's 'people' politely declined an early offer for him to voice the cat, but that all changed when his sister spotted the film's trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE0Sw7CvI0k

"Apparently, his sister showed him the trailer and said, ‘Hey, you gotta see this. You’re gonna love this!’ He flipped out and got in touch with us directly to say ‘If there’s anything I can do, let’s make this work,'” Atencio explained.

The was just one problem, though. Reeves was in Rome filming John Wick 2. “So we had him go to a recording studio in Rome,” Atencio told the newspaper.

“I was on Skype with him, and I spent an hour recording a bunch of dialogue. They hooked it up so that I could talk and he could hear it in his headphones. The studio was wanting him to drop a bunch of references to his old movies. But we didn’t want to make it overt or too pointed. We don’t want him to do, like, his ‘Bill and Ted’ voice and beat you over the head with it. And he had great ideas for lines. He was having fun with it.”

Don't expect to hear him voicing the cat the whole way through, though. Reeves' addition to the film is saved for a specific scene.

The moral of the story? If at first you don't succeed, try and try again!