Bill & Ted stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter have revealed whether they’d be interested in making a fourth movie in the time-hopping sci-fi franchise.
The pair are currently starring together in Jamie Lloyd’s production of Samuel Beckett’s existentialist classic Waiting For Godot on Broadway.
They first appeared together in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure in 1989, playing a pair of slacker high school students who use a time-traveling phone box to help them prepare a presentation for their history class.
In the 1991 sequel Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, which was partly inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, the pair faced off against death itself. They returned for another sequel, Bill & Ted: Face the Music, in 2020.
Asked by Variety whether they could make a fourth film in the series after their run on Broadway ends early next year, Reeves said emphatically: “Yes and yes.”
Winter added that their long working relationship has proved beneficial for their take on Beckett, saying: “Jamie remarked that our friendship, our history together, really suits the play because of the friendship and connection that two characters have.”
When the first Bill & Ted film turned 30 in 2019, The Independent’s Ed Power described the cult comedy as “pathologically silly” and “surprisingly influential.”
The most recent film in the franchise, Bill & Ted Face The Music, was well received by critics.
In a four-star review for The Independent, film critic Clarisse Loughrey wrote: “Can a song save the world? It’s the oddly profound question at the heart of the otherwise dopey, rambunctious Bill & Ted Face the Music. But that’s always been a part of the DNA of these films – an exquisite mix of philosophy, history, and the ‘woah, dude’ cant of two Californian slackers.
“Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and its sequel Bogus Journey, didn’t stand out as the funniest, wittiest or even most original films of the late Eighties and early Nineties, but there was always a stirring earnestness to the adventures of Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) and Bill S Preston, Esq (Alex Winter).
“As they rocketed through time, space and the afterlife, often with the aid of a rickety time-traveling phone booth, their motto of ‘be excellent to each other and party on, dudes’ became its own kind of escapism.
“If only life really were that simple. Bill & Ted Face the Music, a long-brewing third installment, doesn’t change a single ounce of this formula. It’s gloriously uncool, unmodern and uncynical.”
