When Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss returned to star in The Matrix film series for last year’s third sequel, The Matrix Resurrections, Laurence Fishburne, their co-star in the original trilogy, didn’t join them on screen. While the Oscar-nominated actor’s character of Morpheus is long dead during the events of the sci-fi action franchise’s fourth entry, he still shared his thoughts on the movie during an interview with Variety.
While appearing on the red carpet at the premiere of Netflix’s newly released fantasy film, The School for Good and Evil, on Tuesday evening, Fishburne shared his thoughts on Resurrections. He praised his former co-stars’ performances, but gave a more tentative opinion on the overall movie.
“It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. And it wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be,” the Emmy Award-winning actor told Variety’s Marc Malkin. “But I thought Carrie-Anne and Keanu really did their thing. Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Fishburne was also asked whether he felt like he had missed out on being a part of the series’ revival, which Warner Bros. distributed 18 after its immediate predecessor, The Matrix Revolutions, was released. In response, he answered: “No, not really.”
The Golden Globe-nominated actor’s response came after he said in August 2020 that he wasn’t “invited” to return for Resurrections. He added that he still supported the film, however, saying: “I wish them well. I hope it’s great.”
Along with Reeves and Moss, Resurrections also featured several other actors from the original Matrix trilogy who reprised their roles, including Jada Pinkett Smith and Lambert Wilson.
However, along with Fishburne, Hugo Weaving, who played the primary antagonist Agent Smith in the series’ first three installments, didn’t return for the most recent follow-up. Morpheus has been turned into a computer game character that’s escaping a matrix created by Reeves’s Neo, and is therefore not the same Morpheus from the original trilogy.
Since both Morpheus and Smith do influence the plot of Resurrections in new ways, they’re both portrayals by different actors. A version of Morpheus is played by Abdul-Mateen, and Smith is portrayed by Jonathan Groff.
While Fishburne didn’t reunite with Reeves in Resurrections, the duo is set to work together in the fourth John Wick movie. The Black-ish star first appeared in the action franchise’s second entry, in which he played the Bowery King, a leader of a band of New Yorker assassins and an uneasy ally to Reeves’ titular ex-hitman.