Alex Winter on Fame, Artificial Intelligence and Reuniting with Keanu Reeves: “Sometimes we’re a mess and we’re like, ‘Damn, that was good!’ ” | movie

SNine weeks ago, Alex Winter was on stage for the first night of previews of Waiting for Godot — the latest Broadway revival of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece, in which Winter plays the reckless Vladimir opposite Keanu Reeves’ equally aimless Estragon.

Winter is an old pro at live shows: He spent nearly all of his middle and high school years on Broadway, where he performed eight shows a week. He and Reeves, his longtime friend and truest star of the Bill & Ted movies, had the idea for the revival three years ago and had been preparing ever since.

However, on stage for the first time since he was a teenager, the 60-year-old actor felt a moment of panic. “I was like, ‘Oh my God! What if I’m wrong?” he says, sitting on a velvet sofa in the theater hall a few hours before he continues again. “And I look at Keanu, who is in a similar state of terror. And – well, it would have worried me if either of us had said “whatever.”

Naturally, the show went on. Winter and Reeves, the lovable time-traveling zombies of the past, have been reunited as disoriented companions in timeless purgatory, now a third of the way through their 16-week period. Sipping tea, wearing a blue scarf, Winter looks relaxed, talkative and pensive at the same time. He supports people being too afraid to take a little more creative risk. “One hundred percent. There must have been a jump out of the plane.” [feeling] Without jumping out of a plane, you know.

Winter will know. In addition to returning to Broadway, this season brings the release of Adulthood, his first film as a director in more than a decade. (He also appears in the black comedy as an eccentric man.) A child actor turned movie star turned director, producer, and prolific techno documentary director, Winter’s career has been fitful, searching, unconventional, and full of sharp left turns and voracious curiosity. (In Godot, the New Yorker’s Helen Shaw noted, accurately, that Winter’s “obvious intelligence drives the show.”) Returning to Broadway, where he made his debut at the age of thirteen, is a bit like closing a loop. “I’ve lived three times since then. But now being backstage and warming up, being in the wings and seeing the stagehands – it’s like I never left. It’s like a complete time curve.”

A joint film with Reeves, the eccentric and thoughtful yin to Winter’s quick and talkative yang, a “savior” with whom Winter most recently appeared on screen in Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020). “I knew this was a huge project, and the only reason I felt like we could do it was because we were together,” he says. Working with Reeves provides “an immediate sense of comfort. I know I can trust him and he can trust me. We really have each other’s backs. There’s no bullshit.”

Reeves and Winter, with their always precise comic timing and unique chemistry, are the yeast on this bleak existential affair, where phrases like “Together again at last…” add a jolt of sweetness — and indulge in airy guitar flourishes. In fact, Winter says performing with Reeves again is “like being in a band.” (They both play bass.) “It’s this smooth give and take. Sometimes I cook and he catches up. Sometimes I catch up and he cooks. Sometimes we help each other out of a hole. Sometimes we’re just in a fucking groove and we look at each other and say, ‘God damn, that was good!’ Where the hell did this come from?

Vladimir and Estragon, old friends with a theatrical past, share qualities with the duo—particularly “questioning about faith and life”—that have brought them together since their early twenties. “We were really interested in literature and drama, but we also wondered, ‘What is this world? How do you live in it?’ Winter laughs. How do you maintain artistic integrity and have a career in Hollywood? How can you continue to have fun? After the success of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure in 1989, How Do You Become Famous?

By this point, Winter had already been acting for more than half his life. Born in England to contemporary dancers, he first took to the stage at the age of 10 in St. Louis, Missouri; When he was 12, he and his mother moved to New York after a divorce, she got him a children’s talent agent. Within a month, he was on Broadway opposite Yul Brynner in The King and I. He spent most of his high school years in Peter Pan, playing John Darling alongside Sandy Duncan.

Here, he developed the child actor’s branding system — a topic he later explored in his 2020 documentary Showbiz Kids — and the lasting emotional scars caused by prolonged sexual abuse by an unnamed adult who, he says, has since died. The “nightmarish” experience, which he did not publicly disclose until 2018, left him suffering from “severe PTSD” and a mental breakdown that, as he told The Guardian in 2020, became “worse and worse and worse.”

He didn’t talk about it and continued working, first an off-Broadway play, then commercials, then NYU film school, then an audition for Joel Schumacher’s vampire drama The Lost Boys. The principal encouraged him to drop out. The part was small, but the film, which was released in 1987, “completely changed my life.” A year after graduation, he moved to Los Angeles.

By the time the Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey sequel was released in 1991, Winter had already shifted focus, directing music videos and commercials and co-creating Idiot Box, a late-night sketch series for MTV. In 1993, he co-wrote and directed the hit film Freaked, in which he played a former child star who is kidnapped and turned into a mutant by Randy Quaid. By the age of 26, he was “fried.” Winter fired his agents and moved to New York, then London, where he founded a production company. “I just wanted to get out of the public eye, be on the subway, go to my office in Soho and start a family,” he says. He found a therapist and began to confront the trauma of the abuse. He had three children, the youngest of whom was about to graduate from high school in Los Angeles.

He began pursuing wide-ranging interests in nonfiction as a documentarian—first Napster, the download site that revolutionized music consumption; Then Bitcoin and the dark web; And then the Panama Papers, blockchain, and the rebel musician Frank Zappa. His most recent documentary, 2022’s The YouTube Effect, traced the video-sharing platform’s path from bland novelty to conspiracy theory machine. “My career is where I want it to be, which is to have the ability to do whatever interests me the most,” he says wisely. “But I wouldn’t have been okay if I hadn’t broken up.”

Adulthood, which Winter co-produced from a script by Michael M. B. Galvin, brings some of Winter’s prevailing concerns back into the realm of metaphor: Two siblings, infant Noah (Josh Gad) and troubled Megan (Kaya Scodelario), discover a skeleton in their parents’ basement, setting off a deadly spiral of bad decisions fueled by fear of financial ruin and reputational ruin. Winter says the film is “at its core about the relentless and unspoken impossibility of living in this culture today” and “the fallacy of the middle class” in countries, like the US and the UK, that are actively working to hollow it out.

Winter has never been shy about his political affiliations. Earlier this year, he helped organize anti-Musk Tesla protests — and was quick to connect the fratricidal moves to the larger climate in the United States. In adulthood, he says, “stress can subtly turn you into immoral actions, which has a lot to do with the times we’re living in, where people who were Bernie’s bros suddenly turned into MAGAs.” Noah’s pathetic internet sensation is based, in part, on Winter’s experience in the bowels of YouTube. “Having been surrounded by a lot of fan-type people because of my work, I feel like I know them well,” he says. “I don’t despise them, but I think they need to grow up.”

Winter, who has long been a chronicler of the Internet’s maturation, is now focusing on artificial intelligence. “I’ve been thinking about an AI doc for about five years, and it wasn’t the right time because it’s moving so fast,” he says. During the writers’ and actors’ strikes, which took place in part over AI protections, Winter served as an interviewer of sorts, running guild members’ Zoom sessions with AI technologists, academics, copyright lawyers, and patent experts. “Most of the criticism is really stupid, like people who say, ‘I’m a leader in the anti-AI charge, and we have to make this or that law,’ and they have no idea what they’re talking about, and none of it will ever work,” he says.

It’s not anti-regulation, it’s more accurate and clear in information, and definitely anti-trafficking. “There are a lot of smart people in this field,” he says, with “good morals.” (This does not include, as he points out, OpenAI’s Sam Altman.) But “the reality is that there will be a tremendous amount of carnage on the way to things being okay. In every field, from Hollywood to climate to journalism, people are being fired everywhere. They’re not being replaced by a robot. They’re not being replaced.”

Economic pressures, job displacement, a rightward shift toward authoritarianism to solve problems that can’t be solved and won’t be solved—it’s an old cycle, now playing out again, taking us back to Godot, which is based in part on Beckett’s experience in the French Resistance during World War II. Winter returns to the question posed by Estragon in Act One – “Do we have no rights anymore?” – Where the duo surrenders to not waiting for anyone. “We got rid of them,” Vladimir answers.

“Every night, I tell Keanu this line: ‘We’ve been stripped of our rights,'” Winter says ruefully. “We were stupid. We did it again.” As always, the show goes on.