Here, before you're quite ready for him, is Keanu Reeves: At the top of the driveway of the Chateau Marmont, smoking a cigarette on a low couch, like he's on his front porch.

He's been coming here since the early '90s. The Chateau was run-down and empty then—a seedier, pre-André Balazs version of itself. The faucets didn't always work. The carpets were dicey. “You didn't want to take your shoes off,” Reeves says.

It felt like anything could happen. Usually it did.

“You could have a conversation,” Reeves says. “You could have a tryst. You could fucking do drugs. You could hang out. For me, there's still that pulse here.”

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He basically moved in for a while there. Could be found splashing in the pool with the likes of Sharon Stone or hiding in a corner “playing chess with his computer and smoking compulsively to fight stress,” depending which tabloid tall tale you bought.

Now he lives in a house, not far from here, up in the Hills. He's owned it for about 12 years. Sometimes he sits up there and wonders if it's the house he's going to die in. It's not a preoccupation—he's just curious, if this is going to be it, this place in the Hills. “I didn't think about that,” he says, “when I was 40.”

Crossing the lobby, Reeves silently side-eyes a case of Gucci Chateau merch. A woman sees it's Keanu Reeves crossing the lobby and gulps—like audibly gulps.

He's shown to a semi-private corner in the garden. Chairs around a mirrored coffee table. A wet Monday morning has given way to a cold Monday afternoon. It's early February and the No. 15 rap song in America is “Keanu Reeves,” by Logic, who was one year old when Point Break came out in 1991.

Every generation gets its own Keanu Reeves, except every generation's Keanu Reeves is this Keanu Reeves.

Today the real Keanu Reeves has that same patchy beard. That same curtain of hair falling into his eyes. He's wearing those same chunky Merrell hiking boots he was wearing pretty much regardless of context long before normcore made The New York Times. You have to look close at the gray flyaways in his eyebrows to remember what year it is.

He's 54 and getting over a cold. His cough sounds like somebody punching their way out of a paper grocery bag. He zips his shaggy black fleece up to the neck. But then a Chateau guy wheels over a heat lamp for Keanu. Another Chateau guy wheels over another heat lamp for the other side of the table. Then the sun comes out, as if it, too, wants to make sure Keanu is warm enough. The sun bounces off the tabletop and up into Keanu's face. It's a nice, low fill light.