Neo plugs in.

Seconds later, he opens his eyes and announces one of The Matrix’s most famous lines:

“I know kung fu.”

For Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss, learning how to look that convincing took considerably longer.

When The Matrix arrived in 1999, audiences saw bodies apparently freed from the normal laws of physics. Neo twisted through the air. Trinity ran up walls. Morpheus attacked with the speed and authority of a seasoned fighter. The movie’s revolutionary “bullet time” effect helped make those moments unforgettable, but computers were only part of the illusion.

Behind the digital imagery was something much less futuristic: months of repetitive, exhausting physical preparation.

The Wachowskis brought in legendary Hong Kong filmmaker and action choreographer Yuen Woo-ping to build the fights. Rather than disguise inexperienced performers with constant cuts, the filmmakers wanted the audience to spend enough time looking at Reeves, Fishburne, Moss and Hugo Weaving to believe those characters were genuinely performing the movements. The principal cast therefore trained extensively in martial-arts choreography and wire work before and during production.

That decision changed the appearance of the movie.

It also put its stars through an extraordinary physical ordeal.

They Weren’t Given the Easy Version of Stunt Training

Yuen had spent decades working in Hong Kong action cinema, where fight scenes were often treated almost like dances: carefully rehearsed sequences involving performers, cameras and stunt crews moving together.

For The Matrix, the challenge was obvious. His actors were not lifelong martial artists.

Yuen later recalled that four months was generous by normal filmmaking standards but almost absurdly short compared with the years required to truly master martial arts. Each principal actor was paired with a member of his team for conditioning, stretching and choreography.

Carrie-Anne Moss later remembered the cast training together as a unit with Yuen’s Hong Kong team for roughly six months. Chad Stahelski, who doubled Reeves and worked closely on the martial-arts action, has described the philosophy behind that preparation in even starker terms: the actors were trained much more like stunt performers than celebrities being gently prepared for a few action shots.

They repeated movements relentlessly.

That repetition mattered because the Wachowskis wanted to avoid hiding every complicated move behind a stunt double or a rapid edit. Stahelski has said the production would sometimes shoot 20 or 30 takes specifically because longer, clearer shots helped preserve the illusion that the character — not an unseen double — was performing the action.

And no member of the cast had a more complicated route into that training than Reeves.

Keanu Reeves Began Training in a Neck Brace

Shortly before the movie’s intensive physical preparation, Reeves discovered that he had a serious problem in his cervical spine.

He had been losing his sense of balance and recalled falling in the shower. Doctors eventually found that vertebrae in his neck were beginning to fuse. According to Matrix executive producer Barrie M. Osborne, Reeves was warned that without surgery the possible consequences were extremely serious.

He underwent an operation.

Then he went to train for The Matrix.

In a neck brace.

For a period after surgery, Reeves was not allowed to kick. That is a remarkable restriction for an actor preparing to play a character whose sudden mastery of kung fu becomes one of the movie’s defining ideas. Instead of abandoning the plan, Yuen’s team adapted the choreography around what Reeves’ recovering body could safely handle.

Stahelski later estimated that Reeves still performed at least 95 percent of the martial-arts choreography, while doubles took over for especially hard impacts, complicated flips or movements that posed too much risk to his neck.

Even some of the wire work remained Reeves himself.

“He wanted to do everything,” stunt coordinator Glenn Boswell recalled, though the crew sometimes had to persuade him to let a double take over when the strain on his neck was unnecessary.

The movie never announces any of this.

Neo simply looks increasingly unstoppable.

The Morpheus-Neo Fight Took Months to Build — Then Left Them Covered in Bruises

Perhaps no scene better demonstrates the process than Neo’s famous dojo confrontation with Morpheus.

Inside the Matrix, it looks effortless.

Morpheus is teaching Neo that the normal limitations of speed, gravity and physical strength no longer apply. Their fight begins as a lesson and escalates into one of the movie’s most recognizable sequences.

More than a quarter-century later, Fishburne revealed just how long he remembered preparing for it.

Speaking at New York Comic Con in October 2025, Fishburne said he and Reeves worked on the sequence for approximately 10 months in total — about six months before arriving in Australia and another four months of continued practice there.

Even after all that preparation, they had not been repeatedly performing the entire fight at full power.

Then the cameras rolled.

According to Fishburne, the dojo sequence was shot across roughly three days. Once he and Reeves began making full physical contact during takes, the difference became painfully obvious.

Their forearms ended up “black and blue” with bruises.

That detail reveals something the finished film hides brilliantly.

The sequence looks smooth because they had rehearsed it so extensively. But rehearsing choreography and repeatedly performing it at production intensity were not the same experience.

What appears on screen as superhuman control was being produced by two very human actors colliding again and again.

Carrie-Anne Moss Had Almost No Martial-Arts Background

Then there was Trinity.

Moss would become one of the defining action heroines of the era, but she did not enter The Matrix as an experienced martial artist.

In an early interview, she said the closest thing in her background had been a karate-aerobics class. Even her screen test was physically punishing. WIRED later reported that Moss spent days sparring and practicing with stunt performers during the audition process and said afterward that she could barely walk for days.

Production was harder.

One of Trinity’s signature moments required Moss to perform a wall-assisted cartwheel during the government-building action sequence. Moss recalled hurting her ankle badly just before the move and becoming convinced she might have broken it.

She kept working.

Her boot offered some support, and adrenaline carried her through three days of action. But when the weekend arrived, Moss said she could barely walk. A contemporaneous account from 1999 also described her suffering ankle and hip injuries during the production and spending months preparing for the wall-running action.

Even without the injury, the psychological challenge was considerable.

Moss remembered practicing the wall sequence over and over, depending completely on spotters to catch her. When the padding was finally removed from the concrete wall for filming, she became frightened enough that she went home in tears.

Then she came back and did it.

The Most Futuristic Movie of 1999 Relied on Something Very Old-Fashioned

Today, The Matrix is remembered for its green code, philosophical questions, virtual worlds and groundbreaking bullet-time photography.

All of that deserves its place in film history.

But the action worked because the digital innovation was supported by physical performance.

The Wachowskis and Yuen Woo-ping did not need Reeves, Fishburne and Moss to become genuine competitive fighters. They needed something different: enough conditioning, choreography, timing and muscle memory that the camera could remain on them and the audience would accept Neo, Morpheus and Trinity as people who truly knew how to move that way.

The approach helped introduce mainstream Western audiences to a much more Hong Kong-influenced style of wire-assisted, carefully choreographed screen combat. BFI has noted how Yuen’s work on The Matrix helped raise his international profile and how the film’s action language echoed through later productions ranging from Charlie’s Angels to Kill Bill.

That may be the most fitting contradiction in the making of The Matrix.

The movie convinced millions of viewers that Neo, Trinity and Morpheus could bend the rules of reality.

To create that illusion, Reeves, Moss and Fishburne first had to push their very real bodies remarkably hard.