'I like women': Norman Reedus on Ana de Armas, John Wicks' spin-off 'Ballerina', and saying Yes to Bollywood

I don't have any problem sharing anything with women. I like women.

I'm a big fan of the John Wick movies already. I've seen them all, like 1000 times. I like the tone of them. I like the action sequences, I like the stories, I like the style, I like all of it. Getting to be in a John Wick movie is kind of a bucket list thing for me. I'm a big fan of the franchise. I'm a big fan of Keanu. I like everything about them. I like stories of heroes who don't know they're heroes and they are just trying to get through it. I've always been a fan of movies like that. I like the Kung Fu series. I like Billy Jack. I like Outlaw Josie Wales.

I thought Ana brought her own flavour to the movie. I was a big fan of her in the movie Blonde, I had just seen it, and I thought she was really fearless as an actor in that movie, and I knew that she would bring that to the John Wick franchise. And I'm a big fan of Len's. I've worked with him before, so, yeah, it was kind of a no brainer for me to do this.

Yeah, it actually is sort of a musical because all the action had to be perfectly synchronised because everything you do is a cue for someone else. So like, when I'm leaning against the wall and I'm yelling to my little girl, ‘Baby, get down,’ that's a cue for someone else to fire and two people to start fighting and pieces of walls to start exploding around my head. Like everything's sort of a very down-to-the-moment, timed ballet. No pun intended.

No, no. It's the same. It's exactly the same. I mean, I remember once I did something—I had to punch Kris Kristofferson [in Blade II] —and I didn't want to, just because I liked him. So, I don't think it has to do with being a man or a woman. It has to do with personalities, and if personalities clash or work well together? So, I'm glad I didn't have to fight Ana, because she probably would have beat me up. She is very strong.

Yeah, it was interesting to me to dwell on Daniel's story: His father is a very imposing head of a cult-like group of mercenaries. And so what would that be like growing up in that reality? So he probably grew up with a lot of money, a lot of secrecy, not a lot of friends outside of that group. As he got older, he probably killed a bunch of people, and maybe started to regret that sort of lifestyle once he had his own child. So he's willing now to fight everybody to protect the innocence of his little girl, and to the point where he's now hiding in that hotel where you're not allowed to fight, but the money is—the bounty on his head has gone up so much that he's just on pins and needles. He's hiding in there now and he's got the place completely booby-trapped. He's just trying to keep his little girl happy and not panic her. And then Eve comes in, but she doesn't come in shooting. So he's got the gun on her, and he's like, ‘What do you want?’ And then he realises that, okay, this is probably the person that's going to help him. So he starts to plead with her, please help us. And then he kind of uses this little girl to persuade her as well, because she's just so super cute. So he's got her helping her... help him convince her. And she's kind of like an angel that shows up at the right time.

It's different from role to role. For Daryl Dixon in The Waling Dead, in that sort of a world there's a very fine line between good and bad. In that world, bad people do good things in an apocalypse, good people do bad things in an apocalypse and the world keeps rolling. So I try to take it more for face value and less of as a black-and-white scenario. In an apocalyptic situation or a world full of assassins, being good and bad, those lines blur quite a bit, you know.

I don't know. I'm not a big fan of telling people what to think, or pretending I know what everybody thinks. I don't like it when people tell me what to do, and I don't tell people what to do. But, you know, the world is full of colours, and everything is not so this or that! It's now always 'Us versus Them'. So there's a lot of room for interpretation in all of it.

I don't know about cracking the code. I think the code changes all the time. So the playing field gets longer and longer, weirder and rounder. So I don't really know. I have been in TV for a long time, and I remember every Sunday was like, ‘Our numbers, our numbers, we beat football!’ And then that changed, because there came so many streamers [OTT platforms]. And then it's like, how many people subscribe to your platform and those numbers change constantly. People now wait on streamers till the whole series comes out so they can binge watch it, and then certain platforms start putting out an entire series all at once. So the rules keep changing. You know what I mean? I did a movie a long time ago called The Boondock Saints, and it never went to theatres ever. But just through word of mouth, it made hundreds of millions of dollars because people started talking about it and passing DVDs around. So I feel like if there's a good movie or there's a good TV show, people tell other people. So the best way to find good movies and TVs is probably through your friends.

“I don't know. I don't want to ever leave! It wasn't my plan to be an actor from the beginning. I just became one but then I was painting, I was sculpting, I was doing lots of different things and I continue to still do all of those things while I act. So I don't really know. All I know is that I'm a good father. I have a little girl and she's pretty awesome, and we hang out a lot. Maybe that could be my legacy.

Yeah, I would love to do that. I've never even thought about doing one. That would be great. I don't know if I'm a very good dancer, though, and I definitely can't sing.”

To teach me is a lot of hours of lessons. But yeah, I would totally do a Bollywood film!