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Keanu Reeves has always been famously private about his personal life, especially after living through a heartbreaking two-year span in the early 2000s when he first lost his baby daughter and then the baby’s mother died in a car accident.
It also turns out that the “John Wick” star is not like a lot of other male celebrities who are famous for only being attracted to women whose key attributes are their youth and pretty looks.
From all accounts, Reeves, 55, lives up to his public persona of being a genuinely decent human being. That means if he was going to get involved in a serious relationship, it would have to be with a woman who possesses qualities he values.
As the world learned this week, Reeves has evidently found that woman in Alexandra Grant, a 46-year-old Los Angeles-based artist who is “spiritual, sensitive and kind,” according to the Daily Mail, via a report from Life Style & Weekly.
Reeves and Grant made their public debut as a couple by holding hands as they arrived at the high-profile, high-society Los Angeles County Museum of Art Art + Film Gala Monday night.
While Reeves’ representatives didn’t officially confirm a romance, the pair’s PDA-filled appearance couldn’t be taken as anything other than a signal to the world that Hollywood’s coolest A-lister and male heartthrob is seriously dating someone.
Social media celebrated seeing Reeves paired up with an “age-appropriate” woman who also looked to be very comfortable in her own skin. With her head of silver hair, Grant did not come across as a woman who is interested in downplaying the fact that she’s in her 40s. Her flat silver heels, going with her midnight-blue gown, also displayed a welcoming preference for ease and practicality.
Life & Style Weekly, citing a source, said Grant has been “one of the few people who’s managed to get Keanu to open up about his emotions and past.” Her artistic and sensitive nature and her “earthiness” appealed to the actor, the site said.
“He was in such a dark place for so long, but Alexandra’s positive outlook and support have played a huge part in helping him turn his life around,” a friend of the actor added to Life & Style Weekly. “Some say she’s not only stolen his heart but she’s also saved him.”
Reeves’ last public relationship, with Jennifer Syme, ended after their daughter, Ava, was stillborn eight months into Syme’s pregnancy. While Reeves and Syme stayed friends, tragedy struck again two years later when Syme died in a car accident in 2001.
In addition to being “kind, warm and spiritual,” Grant also is “a great communicator,” the friend told Life & Style Weekly.
It has been reported that Reeves and Grant have been friends for as long as 10 years, though it is not clear how long they have been romantically involved. They have, however, been very public about collaborating on several book projects.
As Los Angeles Magazine reported in 2018, Reeves and Grant worked together on his 2011 adult picture book, “Ode to Happiness.” The tongue-in-cheek book, described as a “reminder not to take oneself too seriously,” featured words by Reeves and illustrations by Grant.
They teamed up again in 2016 for another book, “Shadows,” which W Magazine described as a “poetic” meditation on grief and “the transmutation of grief as catharsis.”
About the book’s title, Grant told W Magazine: “It seemed to me that the shadow was the perfect sort of physical manifestation of moving through darkness into light. I liked that idea of the meeting place between light and dark and two different people.”
The pair also founded X Artists’ Books, a publishing house for “beautiful, socially conscious” art and literary books, which they established in 2017, according to Los Angeles Magazine.
About their collaboration on books and the publishing house, Grant told the magazine: “Some people are kind of dreamers who have a lot of ideas but don’t like to get things done. I think we both like to have the idea and get it into the world.”
According to Grant’s website, she spent significant portions of her childhood and adolescence living in Mexico, France and Spain, an international upbringing that fueled her artistic interest in how language and images guide the way “we think and exchange ideas.”
Grant has a bachelor’s in art history and studio art from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and earned her master’s in fine arts from San Francisco’s acclaimed California College of Arts and Crafts. Her work has been exhibited internationally and she founded the grantLOVE project, which raises money to benefit nonprofit organizations linked to the arts.
In recent years, Reeves and Grant have been spotted together at art galleries and book signings, the Daily Mail reported. They also posed together for Vogue Spain, and she traveled with him as he did publicity for “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum,” the Daily Mail added. Reeves’ film career has enjoyed a resurgence this past year with his voice work for “Toy Story 4” and his particularly delightful, self-mocking cameo in the Netflix rom-com “Always Be My Maybe.”
Grant opened up to W Magazine about working with Reeves on “Shadows,” saying, “We can spend a lot of time debating. Like, ‘A raspberry hue? And should it be darker?’ We can get obsessive.”
In 2016, Grant also offered to the Los Angeles Times another reason she appreciates Reeves — at least artistically: “No one can move the way he can. He’s a really extreme performer.”
