You’d be hard pressed to find someone who’d naturally put Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece Waiting for Godot in the same sentence. One is a wacky, sci-fi adventure tale that has found a home in the somewhat stoner-adjacent comedy genre. The other is, well, Waiting for Godot.
And yet, the two have made unlikely bed fellows with a new revival of Beckett’s play at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre through January 4, 2026. It co-stars Bill and Ted themselves, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. But as unlikely as that combo might seem, the reuniting duo says it feels natural, and that the two works have more in common than you might think on the surface. As Reeves notes: “Bill and Ted are in an existential quandary, and both [plays] are about overcoming.”
Godot doesn’t share Bill and Ted’s time-traveling adventure aspects, but it is, at its heart, about two friends. And the film soars on the onscreen chemistry between Reeves and Winter. The two hadn’t met until auditioning for Bill and Ted, but quickly struck up an offscreen friendship that reaped major rewards for their onscreen chemistry.
“Oh, it was an immediate kinship, friendship,” Reeves says of meeting Winter. “He played bass, I played bass. We both rode motorcycles. And we were both East Coast theatre guys.” As the two write in their Playbill bios, Reeves began his career doing theatre in Toronto (he once played Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet), while Winter made his Broadway debut in 1977 in The King and I, played one of Yul Brynner's children.
“There’s a sincerity to the fact that [Bill and Ted] was written by two close friends and performed by two people who became close friends during the making of that film,” says Winter. “You quite rarely develop friendships in this industry that last, to be honest with you. You come together on a set, you might become very close, and then you scatter. And this is a friendship that’s lasted. We enjoy each other’s humor and company, and have for a long time now.”
This Godot’s director, Jamie Lloyd, is fresh off a 2025 Tony win for last season’s Sunset Blvd., and famously loves to bring an audience’s prior knowledge of his actors into his productions. “You can’t pretend that their profile doesn’t exist,” Lloyd says. “Rather than try to pretend that doesn’t exist or ignore that, I embrace that as a part of the production.”
Lloyd hopes that just as Nicole Scherzinger’s pop-singer past brought a rising-from-the-ashes quality to Sunset (to Tony-winning effect), our knowledge of and affinity for Reeves and Winter’s decades-long friendship will help make their Estragon and Vladimir extra effective in Godot. “That’s the joy of the production, the secret,” he says. “There’s a shorthand between them, there’s a playfulness. There’s something so effortless—real chemistry.”
And, Reeves says, that’s ultimately why the overlap between Bill and Ted and Godot fans should be total. “If you like Bill and Ted, come and get some Godot,” he offers. “And if you like Beckett, you might enjoy some Bill and Ted.” Party on, dudes!
Alex Winter and Keaunu Reeves in Waiting for Godot
Alex Winter and Keaunu Reeves in Waiting for Godot
Keaunu Reeves and Alex Winter in Waiting for Godot
Alex Winter, Michael Patrick Thornton, Brandon J. Dirden, and Keanu Reeves in Waiting for Godot
Alex Winter, Michael Patrick Thornton, Brandon J. Dirden, and Keanu Reeves in Waiting for Godot
Alex Winter, Eric Williams, and Keaunu Reeves in Waiting for Godot
Keaunu Reeves in Waiting for Godot
Alex Winter and Keaunu Reeves in Waiting for Godot
Brandon J. Dirden in Waiting for Godot
Alex Winter and Eric Williams in Waiting for Godot
Michael Patrick Thornton in Waiting for Godot
Alex Winter and Keaunu Reeves in Waiting for Godot
Michael Patrick Thornton in Waiting for Godot
Alex Winter in Waiting for Godot
Alex Winter, Brandon J. Dirden, and Keaunu Reeves in Waiting for Godot
Alex Winter in Waiting for Godot
Brandon J. Dirden in Waiting for Godot
Eric Williams and Alex Winter in Waiting for Godot
Zaynn Arora and Alex Winter in Waiting for Godot
Keaunu Reeves in Waiting for Godot
Alex Winter and Keaunu Reeves in Waiting for Godot
