Keanu Reeves says studio executives removed transgender character from first draft of The Matrix

The film’s co-director, Lilly Wachowski, had earlier acknowledged how the 1999 film had been an allegory of ‘the trans experience’

As the latest installment in the revolutionary The Matrix franchise, is gearing up for a release this month, its star Keanu Reeves has revealed an interesting fact about the film that started it all. The popular actor stated that the early drafts of the scripts of The Matrix (1999) featured a transgender character.

In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Keanu revealed that an openly transgender character was cut from the early drafts of the film. He also revealed the reason for the cut being that the studio executives were not ‘ready for that’.

The character Keanu referred to was Switch, an androgynous character played by Belinda McClory. The film’s co-director Lilly Wachowski, a trans woman, had earlier confirmed fans’speculations that the film was intended to be an allegory of the closeted experience of a trangender person. ‘The world wasn't quite ready’ for an openly trans film at the time, she said.

In a video for Netflix, the popular filmmaker had also revealed that the character of Switch was originally supposed to be a man in the real world, and a woman upon entering the Matrix. This was supposed to signal the transmasculine experience, Lilly added.

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Lilly had written and directed the 1999 film with her sibling Lana. Both filmmakers had come out as trans women years after the release of the iconic film.

The Matrix Resurrections the latest installment in the franchise, will be released in theaters on December 22.

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