A glimpse of actor Keanu Reeve’s first media jobs spread online once again in May 2022, thanks to a movie podcast.

The show, “All The Right Movies,” posted a clip of Reeves’ work as a correspondent for the CBC Television program “Going Great,” for which he covered the 1984 Canadian International Teddy Bear Convention:

Fact Check

Claim: Actor Keanu Reeves once worked as a CBC TV reporter and covered a teddy bear festival in 1984.

Description: Actor Keanu Reeves once worked as a CBC TV reporter and covered a teddy bear festival in 1984. This claim was reviewed by TruthOrFiction.com.

Rating:

Rating Explanation: The claim is supported by historical clips of Reeve’s time as a correspondent including his coverage of the 1984 Canadian International Teddy Bear Convention. The footage of his reporting has been periodically shared online.

“Why are all the bears’ first name ‘Teddy’?” Reeves asks at one point:

The tweet has been shared thousands of times on the platform. But the footage itself is not new to the Internet; in 2019, the network’s own Twitter account posted highlights of Reeve’s work on the show saying, “Before he was Ted, Neo, or John Wick he was CBC’s Keanu Reeves!”

And CBC also posted Reeve’s report on the teddy bear convention on Twitter and Facebook on September 9 2020 in observance of National Teddy Bear Day:

Since then, clips of Reeve’s reporting days — including his attempts to go horse riding or learn how to juggle — have periodically resurfaced and shared around the Internet. times in recent years.

Reeves talked about his short tenure on the show in a 2017 interview with “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon:

“They’d send you out [to] go interview kids doing things,” Reeves recalled.

“Did you learn how to do anything?” Fallon asked.

“Interview people, I guess,” Reeves said, adding, “They fired me after the first year. I got one year on ‘Going Great,’ and then it wasn’t going at all. I was thinking that maybe I got the show canceled, but there was one more year after me.”

The program was originally produced for a thirteen-episode run, but as the Windsor Star reported in 1983, the U.S. cable channel Nickelodeon bought an additional 26 episodes. Its final episode aired in February 1984.

Though born in Lebanon, Reeves spent most of his early life in Toronto. In December 2021, Reeves marked his induction into the Canadian Walk of Fame by paying respect not just to the city but to the artistic scene that spurred him to become an actor.

“Shout out to the movie theatres that changed my life,” he said. “Bloor Street cinema, the University cinema, the Eglinton cinema, Roncesvalles, and the 1984 Toronto International Film Festival.”

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