Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele dominated pop culture for several years with their influential sketch comedy show Key and Peele. Now they’ve transitioned to the silver screen with their first feature, the over-the-top rescue mission Keanu. The film is naturally a comedy but it finds laughs in unexpected places making it the perfect launching pad.
The comedic duo star as two aimless friends who bond over loneliness and ’90s action movies while the titular Keanu is their unofficial feline mascot. When the kitten goes missing the search leads them to a gangster underworld they’re completely unprepared for and the laughs continue from there.
Seven kittens were trained on set to play the singular part of Keanu onscreen and to hear Key and Peele tell it, the hardest parts of training seven kittens to do one thing turned out to be the easiest. The two stars recently traveled to San Francisco to talk to us about “Keanu” and this is a transcription of that conversation.
Q: This is obviously your first feature film together, what was it about this project that made you want to do it first?
Keegan Michael Key: We basically needed a film to sum up the style of comedy on our show.
Jordan Peele: And we wrote this movie as Three Amigos meets New Jack City where we get thrown into this world that we’re not prepared for. We ultimately came up with Keanu to link it all together and have the audience fall in love with the mascot of the movie.
Q: Does that mean the set was full of practical jokes?
Key: Because of the budget of this movie we didn’t have a lot of time to do practical jokes.
Peele: We did have a fourth of July celebration where someone brought $300 worth of fireworks to the place I was renting. And all night Method Man is lighting fireworks off of my balcony. I’m a fan of his but at some point I had to say, that’s expensive!
Key: We spent a lot of time together as a cast because the best part about shooting on location is spending time away from home. You only have each other.
Q: When you were coming up with this story did you have any humanitarian intent or did it evolve after the production?
Peele: It wasn’t there during the writing process but once I had the script I knew we had to preach the adoption of cats. We love animals and we’re dog people too.
Q: You were training seven kittens on set to all do the same thing, what were some of the hardest things you tried to get these kittens to do that weren’t working in the moment?
Key: The two or three kittens were only trained to do stationary movement. The thing that seems the hardest is always the easiest which is running or explosions happening around them. It seems like that would be difficult but it’s all the stationary stuff that was difficult.
Peele: The best thing about cat videos are when the cat does something that’s imperfect. Any moment that you catch with a cat being clumsy or sneezing is gold. We set this movie up so we can catch cats doing what cats do.
Q: When you look back at the TV show did its success surprise you in any way?
Peele: It’s always hard to see what a sketch show is going to look like in the beginning, if we had to guess we would’ve gotten close. But the thing we couldn’t have foreseen was the way it worked online. I’ve never seen anything like that and when we set out to make a TV show, it ended up this online phenomenon that was the bread and butter of what we did.
Key: When you look back at it now it seems obvious, the modular nature of the show would lend itself to the internet. But you’re not thinking about that when your nose is to the grindstone creating it.
Keanu is now playing in theaters nationwide.
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