It takes great actors to make Samuel Beckett’s modernist comedy masterpiece, Waiting for Godot , work. As the character Estragon exclaims toward the play, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” And in the right hands, it’s hilarious. In the fall of 2025, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter — that’s right, Bill and Ted — will be giving it a go (or a no-go if you go by the script) on Broadway.
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Director Jamie Lloyd will helm the production, which casts Reeves as Estragon and Winter as Vladimir. Reeves, who has been busy appearing in John Wick and Matrix movies for most of his career, will be making his Broadway debut. (He did play Hamlet in Manitoba in 1995, though). Winter, whose film acting career includes a memorable turn in The Lost Boys and pictures he’s directed like Deep Web and Zappa , previously appeared on the Great White Way as a child, playing Louis Leonowens in The King and I from 1977 to ’78 and John Darling in Peter Pan from 1979 to 1981.
“We’re incredibly excited to be on stage together and work with the great Jamie Lloyd in one of our favorite plays,” Reeves and Winter said in a statement, per The Hollywood Reporter .
“[Reeves and Winter’s] instant chemistry and their shorthand and their friendship is going to be so valuable,” Lloyd, who recently directed Broadway’s revival of A Doll’s House with Jessica Chastain, told The New York Times on Thursday. “This is a very deeply complex play, as we all know, but it’s also a very funny play, and they’re very witty people and their shared sense of humor in those movies and in real life is going to be very beneficial to the production.”
The revival will run at one of the Ambassador Theatre Group’s seven venues, according to The Hollywood Reporter .
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Beckett’s 1953 play features long scenes of Vladimir and Estragon philosophizing and making dirty jokes as they wait for some guy named Godot, whom they never met, to show up. Another duo, Pozzo and Lucky show up, who are even weirder than Vladimir and Estragon, as well as a boy but most of the show is just the two of them hilariously waiting.
Waiting for Godot has appeared on Broadway four previous times. In 2009, Bill Irwin and Nathan Lane were the main stars while John Goodman and John Glover portrayed Pozzo and Lucky, respectively. In 2013, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen were the leads while Shuler Hensley and Billy Crudup were Pozzo and Lucky. Both productions received largely positive reviews, per Did They Like It .
That was not the case when Steve Martin and Robin Williams played the leads with Mike Nichols directing off Broadway in 1988. “Audiences will still be waiting for a transcendent Godot long after the clowns at Lincoln Center, like so many others passing through Beckett’s eternal universe before them, have come and gone,” wrote The New York Times .
But even if the reviews are totally bogus , it shouldn’t ruffle the stars. As Estragon says, “People are bloody ignorant apes.”
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