John Wick 3 animal trainer on Keanu Reeves’ adrenaline-pumping horse fight scene: ‘He looks different on a mobile throne’

While there are a lot of moments that stand out in the John Wick movies, there are two particular sequences that take the cake in John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. Yes, it is the dog fight and Keanu’s horse chase bit in the middle of the traffic that I write of.

The horses are majestic beasts, and as it turns out, our lead star was quite a natural at handling them. Animal trainer Tad Griffith told The Ringer that when he was asked to help out with the fight choreography involving the horses, he asked filmmaker Chad Stahelski, “What could we get away with that would look more like using a horse as a weapon?”

Keanu had a lot of scenes to film with horses, whether it was the stable fight segment, or the bit right after when he is chased by bikers in the midst of a speeding traffic; this meant the actor had to have a personal bond with them.

“He was very kind to the horses at all times. People just get on them and treat them like a prop. That’s the history of the industry, but that’s not what he did at all. He was always concerned about their welfare and how they were feeling and he’d always talk to them, which goes a long way because that’s exactly how we do it,” said the trainer, and if the multiple accounts of Keanu being the generous and considerate person he is made out to be is true, then that sounds about right. But why go with a horse of all the animals, and Tad Griffith was quick to respond, “No matter where our technology goes, no matter what the movies are about, the presence of a man on a horse still puts a man above other men. He looks different when he’s on a mobile throne.”

As far as the scene involving the ferocious-looking dogs are concerned, which primarily featured Keanu and Halle Berry, Reeves said in a behind-the-scenes video that Halle worked a lot with the Belgian Malinois beforehand to get comfortable with them, and by the end of their training period, the canines had started responding to the actor as if she were their trainer: “Halle spent over eight months, on and off, working with the trainers. To a point where, when I was training with her, the trainer said to me, ‘They treat her like a trainer.'”

Keanu, on the other hand, avoided building any kind of relationship with the dogs as in the movie he barely knows them, since they belong to Sofia, Halle’s character. Tad, the trainer, apparently told him to avoid even direct eye contact with the loyal animals, so as to stay true to Wick’s persona in the film.

John Wick Chapter 3 was both a critical and commercial success, having minted over $326 million of a $75 million budget.

John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.