Midway through the Broadway run of Waiting for Godot with his Bill & Ted co-star Keanu, the actor-director talks about his new film, Adulthood, overcoming the abuse he endured as a young performer, and why we’re wrong about artificial intelligence
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ix weeks ago, Alex Winter was on stage at the first night of previews for Waiting for Godot – the latest Broadway revival of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece, in which Winter plays the puttering Vladimir to Keanu Reeves’s equally aimless Estragon.
Winter is an old pro at live performance: he spent almost all of his middle and high school years on Broadway, eight shows a week. He and Reeves, his longtime friend and most righteous co-star of the Bill & Ted movies, had the idea for the revival three years ago and have been prepping ever since.
And yet, on stage for the first time since he was a teenager, the 60-year-old actor had a moment of panic. “I was like: ‘Oh, holy shit! What if I’m wrong?” he says, perched on a velvet sofa in a lounge at the theatre, a few hours before he goes on again. “And I’m looking at Keanu, who’s in a similar state of terror. And – well, it would have worried me if either of us were like, ‘whatever.’”
