Laurence Fishburne has revealed how long he and Keanu Reeves trained for a fight scene in The Matrix.
The 64-year-old American actor and Joe Pantoliano attended New York Comic Con on October 12, where they reflected on how they made one of the most successful sci-fi film, The Matrix and admitted that not a single actor looked for “shortcuts” while preparing for it.
Fishburne shed light onto the dojo training scene between his character Morpheus and Reeve’s Neo, sharing that they both worked 10 months on the scene to deliver a perfect fight sequence.
He said, “We trained for six months before we got to Australia. We got to Australia. We continued practicing the fight for at least four months before we shot it. Then we shot it over like three days. And we had never done it full out. Like we had always marked it. We had never really used all of our physical energy to do it.”
“So we shot it, I think it was on a Friday, the first time we took a shot at it. And by the end of however many takes that we did, both Keanu and I were black and blue with bruises on our forearms. Cause we had never made contact like that before,” the Emmy-winning actor recalled.
“That's how committed we all were to doing this thing. Cause we knew that they had a vision and they communicated with us very well with what they were trying to do,” Laurence Fishburne noted.