Fact Check

Does Pic Show Keanu Eating Ice Cream at a Movie Theater?

A LinkedIn post conflated two different ice cream-related incidents.

Published June 30, 2021

 (@happynibbamoy / Twitter screenshot)
Image Via @happynibbamoy / Twitter screenshot
Claim:
A photograph shows actor Keanu Reeves eating an ice cream cone at a movie theater in 2001.
Context

A photograph shows Keanu Reeves eating an ice cream cone in 2020, which is unrelated to an incident in 2001, when he reportedly bought an ice cream cone just so he would have a receipt to autograph for a young theater employee.

The actor Keanu Reeves is so beloved that he's a cultural fixture, to the extent that he has his own viral stories and memes. Many of the stories about him aren't true. But a story about Reeves posted to LinkedIn in late June 2021 appeared to conflate two Reeves yarns, or at least lead some to believe they were one and the same.

Posted by LinkedIn user Daniel Abrahams, the story pulls together a 2019 Twitter thread written by SB Nation writer James Dalton. Dalton, honoring the release of the Reeves film "John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum," recounted a story from 2001. Dalton said Reeves came to the movie theater Dalton worked at in Sydney, Australia, and bought an ice cream cone from the concession stand just so he would have a receipt to autograph for Dalton.

The LinkedIn post also included a photograph of Reeves eating an ice cream cone.

But that photograph didn't show Reeves at a movie theater 20 years prior to this writing. Instead, it showed Reeves eating an ice cream in 2020, outside a Baskin Robbins shop in the Bay Area city of Alameda, California.

In that latter instance, Jose De Leon and Yahoska Martinez spotted Reeves and asked for a picture.

In other words, the ice cream incident detailed in the LinkedIn post, as originally recounted by Dalton, happened almost 20 years before Reeves was spotted in Alameda in 2020.

Bethania Palma is a journalist from the Los Angeles area who started her career as a daily newspaper reporter and has covered everything from crime to government to national politics. She has written for ... read more

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