Keanu Reeves in a scene from ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’
| Photo Credit: Prime Video

Working on John Wick: Chapter 4 was so exhausting for Hollywood star Keanu Reeves that he wanted his titular character to be “definitively killed at the end of this movie”, franchise producer Basil Iwanyk has revealed.

Reeves reprised his role of the assassin who returns to the world he had left behind to avenge the murder of a pup, a gift from his late wife in the fourth chapter of the action film series directed by Chad Stahelski. It was released in March.

In an interview with the website Collider, Iwanyk revealed the actor became a “shell of himself” as the shooting process neared its completion.

“After the second, third, and fourth movie, making these films is so exhausting and it destroys Keanu, physically and emotionally. By the end, he’s always like, ‘I can’t do this again,’ and we agree with him.

“The guy is just a shell of himself because he just goes off and goes for it. He was like, ‘I want to be definitively killed at the end of this movie.’ We were like, ‘You know, we’ll leave a 10 per cent little opening’,” the producer said.

Iwanyk, who is promoting the upcoming Wick spin-off series The Continental, said Reeves and Stahelski are “getting together to figure out what that story is” for another potential Wick chapter.

“The way I describe it is that they’re like Paul McCartney and John Lennon, and I’m Ringo,” he said in a reference to the iconic music group The Beatles.

“They’ll call me and let me know, ‘All right, we’re showing up. Here’s where you show up, and here’s what our story is’. We all want another John Wick. We don’t know what it looks like and when it will happen, but we love each other and we love this world,” the producer added.

John Wick spin-off series The Continental premieres on Prime Video on September 22.