Keanu Reeves Cut So Much ‘John Wick 4’ Dialogue That He Says Only 380 Words in Nearly Three Hours: He’s ‘Dedicated to Not Speaking’

John Wick is a man of few words. No really. A report from The Wall Street Journal reveals that Keanu Reeves’ eponymous assassin says only 380 words across 103 lines of dialogue during “John Wick: Chapter 4,” which runs nearly three-hours long with its 169 minute runtime. Nearly a third of Reeves’ dialogue in the sequel consists of just one single word.

As reported by Wall Street Journal: “In the first installment, clocking in at 101 minutes, Mr. Reeves said a total of 484 words. With a run time of 169 minutes, the fourth movie pushes three hours but features just 380 words by Wick. About 10% of them are featured in the movie’s trailer, which makes the hero seem almost chatty; Wick says more in that 2.5 minute clip than he does in the first 25 minutes of the movie itself.”

John Wick’s limited dialogue is all by design. “John Wick: Chapter 4” director Chad Stahelski and Reeves “stripped out roughly half the dialogue written for his character in the initial script.” The scene in which John Wick and the villainous Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård) hash out the rules of their duel was scripted with Wick having 50% of the dialogue in the scene, for instance. Reeves cut out chunks of dialogu so that John Wick only has a few one-word responses in the scene, including “pistol” and “no quarter.”

“It’s a shock when you work with him how dedicated he is to not speaking,” the film’s co-screenwriter Michael Finch told The Wall Street Journal.

John Wick’s longest run of dialogue in the movie is just a sentence. “You and I left a good life behind a long time ago, my friend,” John Wick tells his friend Shimazu Koji, the leader of the Osaka Continental Hotel played by Hiroyuki Sanada.

Of course, what John Wick lacks in dialogue he more than makes up for in grueling action scenes where Reeves’ body is put through the wringer. Reeves has called “John Wick: Chapter 4” the hardest action movie he’s ever had to make. The actor spent nearly three months exclusively training for the stunts in the movie. The most challenging one to prep for was a car stunt in which Reeves’ character races around the historic Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France. The actor had to learn how to do a reverse 180 and drift all while reloading his prop gun and shooting it out of the door.

“John Wick: Chapter 4” is now playing in theaters nationwide from Lionsgate.