He is not a restless “creative” seeking a bigger canvas on which to paint. He never seems eager to have this work interpreted as an extension of some larger artistic practice. Off to the side, head down, Joe Rhythm Section keeping time. He’s not the lead singer, for one thing-he’s just the bass player. Whatever the other guys are thinking, for Keanu this is just a hang, at least at first, and even once it becomes more than that, he approaches the whole situation in an admirably un–Thirty Seconds to Mars–esque fashion. Especially in Los Angeles, where you kind of have to take up a hobby-it’s why people play street hockey, which is another thing Keanu starts doing around this time.
So begins the story of Dogstar, a professional rock band that forms and eventually tours the world and puts out two major-label albums, all because it’s really hard to make new guy friends in your thirties, even if you’re Keanu Reeves.
At this point in his life Keanu has finally abandoned his hotel-hobo lifestyle and rented an actual house in Los Angeles he and Mailhouse start jamming there with Gregg Miller, a singer and guitarist who’s also a part-time actor. Keanu has been known to fool around on the bass. But after hockey brings them together, the thing Mailhouse and his fellow actor Keanu Reeves bond over isn’t acting. Chances are you’ve seen Mailhouse on TV, whether you know it or not-he goes on to play a philandering hospital administrator on Melrose Place and a detestable network executive on Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night and the gay man Elaine tries to convert to heterosexuality on Seinfeld, and by the mid-2000s he’s earned TV’s most distinguished working-actor merit badge by guest-starring on three different shows in the CSI universe. When he meets Keanu he’s in the middle of a two-year run on Days of Our Lives as a police officer named Brian Scofield, a performance that will win him the Soap Opera Digest Award for Outstanding Comic Relief Role in 1992. The guy in the jersey is an actor named Robert Mailhouse. He sees a guy in a Detroit Red Wings jersey and starts talking to him about hockey. The way it happens is simultaneously totally normal and totally Hollywood. And yet: in 1991, when he’s somewhere between Point Break and Dracula and old enough to know better, Keanu starts a band.