100 Fun Facts About The Matrix

In which year was The Matrix released in cinemas?

The Matrix opened in US cinemas on March 31, 1999, taking about $27.8 million on its first weekend, seven weeks before Star Wars: Episode I arrived that May.

Who plays Neo in The Matrix?

Keanu Reeves plays Neo, the hacker who learns his world is a simulation, and returned as the character in all three sequels: Reloaded, Revolutions and Resurrections.

Which actor plays Morpheus, captain of the hovercraft that rescues Neo?

Laurence Fishburne plays Morpheus, named for the Greek god of dreams; he returned for Reloaded and Revolutions but not for Resurrections, where a younger program takes the name.

Which actor plays Agent Smith in the original trilogy?

Hugo Weaving plays Agent Smith in all three original films; his flat, precise delivery became a trademark, and Empire ranked Smith 84th among the 100 greatest movie characters.

Which colour of capsule does Morpheus offer that will show Neo the truth about the Matrix?

Morpheus offers the red pill, which shows Neo the truth, against the blue pill that returns him to his old life; 'red-pilled' became a metaphor the film-makers never intended.

What is Neo's given name in the Matrix?

Thomas Anderson is Neo's name inside the Matrix, the one Agent Smith insists on using; his hacker handle Neo is an anagram of 'One', a nod to the prophecy.

What is the name of Morpheus's hovercraft?

The Nebuchadnezzar; the other three are all real ships from the sequels and The Animatrix, and the Mjolnir rescues the crew when it is destroyed in Reloaded.

What is the name of the last free human city?

Zion is the last human city, built deep underground near the Earth's core where it is still warm; its dock is where the Sentinel army breaks through in Revolutions.

Which crew member betrays the others to Agent Smith because he wants to go back into the Matrix?

Cypher, played by Joe Pantoliano, sells out the crew for a steak and a comfortable life back in the Matrix; a wounded Tank kills him before he can unplug Neo.

Which actress plays the Oracle in the first film?

Gloria Foster plays the Oracle in the first film and Reloaded; she died in 2001 before Revolutions was finished, and the recasting was written into the story.

Which crew member sits at the ship's controls, loading programs for those inside the Matrix?

Tank, played by Marcus Chong, is the Nebuchadnezzar's operator; born free in Zion rather than grown by the machines, he has no ports on his body.

How many Academy Awards did The Matrix win?

It won four Oscars, for Film Editing, Sound, Sound Effects Editing and Visual Effects, beating Star Wars: Episode I in all three technical categories the two films shared.

Roughly what did The Matrix cost to make?

The Matrix cost about $63 million and returned more than $460 million worldwide; it was also the first DVD to sell a million copies in the United States.

Which actor turned down Neo in order to make Wild Wild West?

Will Smith turned down Neo to make Wild Wild West, released the same summer in 1999; he has since said he would not have been the right actor for the part.

Which actress was sent the script with the suggestion that Neo be rewritten as a woman?

Sandra Bullock was sent the script by producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who wondered whether Neo could become a woman; she had already starred with Reeves in Speed and reunited with him in The Lake House.

In which city was almost all of The Matrix filmed?

Sydney stood in for an unnamed American city: the Wachowskis shot on Fox Studios soundstages and around Martin Place, and the opening rooftop chase reused a set left over from Dark City.

Which martial-arts choreographer did the Wachowskis hire to stage the fights?

Yuen Woo-ping, the Hong Kong choreographer behind Drunken Master, staged the fights; the cast spent about four months in wire-fu training, which Reeves did after spinal-fusion surgery on his neck.

Which French philosopher's book Simulacra and Simulation was required reading for the cast and crew?

Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation was on the reading list Reeves was handed before he was allowed to open the script; a hollowed-out copy holds Neo's illicit disks in his apartment.

Roughly how long was the shot-by-shot storyboard two comic artists drew for the Wachowskis?

Geof Darrow and Steve Skroce's storyboard was how the sisters convinced a nervous Warner Bros. that two relatively untested directors could deliver.

Which 1995 Japanese anime's opening credits does the falling green code resemble?

Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii's 1995 film, opens with cascading code that the Matrix's green rain echoes; the Wachowskis showed it to producer Joel Silver and said they wanted to do that for real.

According to its designer, the characters of the Matrix code were based on what?

Japanese sushi recipes: designer Simon Whiteley took the glyphs from his Japanese wife's cookbooks, and the green tint nods to early monochrome computer monitors.

Which company made the sunglasses worn throughout The Matrix?

Blinde Design, run by Richard Walker, built a distinct pair of sunglasses for each character; Morpheus's tiny pince-nez frames famously have no arms.

What is the best-known name for The Matrix's slow-motion effect shot with many still cameras?

Bullet time: frames from a ring of still cameras are played in sequence to orbit a frozen moment, a technique also known as time-slice photography.

Which British artist began pioneering the frozen-moment camera-array technique as early as 1980?

Tim Macmillan built his first time-slice camera array as an art student in 1980; Michel Gondry later used a morphing variant in music videos, and John Gaeta's Manex team built The Matrix rigs.

Which composer wrote The Matrix's orchestral score?

Don Davis wrote the orchestral score, built on clashing brass clusters; the soundtrack album was a different beast, stacked with Rammstein, Rob Dougan, Ministry and Rage Against the Machine.

Which crew member is gunned down when police storm the building after the Oracle visit?

Mouse, Matt Doran's young programmer who designed the Woman in Red, is the first to die when police storm the building; Cypher's betrayal set the ambush up.

Why did humans blacken the sky, according to Morpheus?

To deprive the machines of solar power; the machines answered by farming humans in pods for energy, which is the world Neo wakes up in.

In The Matrix, what revives Neo after Agent Smith shoots him dead inside the simulation?

Trinity's kiss and confession of love; the Oracle had told her she would fall for the One, and saying so aloud is what tips him into seeing the code.

The Matrix was added to the US National Film Registry in which year?

The Library of Congress added The Matrix to the National Film Registry in 2012, one of 25 films chosen that year for cultural, historic or aesthetic significance.

Which two BAFTA awards did The Matrix win?

The Matrix won BAFTAs for Best Sound and Best Special Visual Effects; it also collected Saturn Awards that year for Best Science Fiction Film and Best Director.

Which two Matrix sequels were both released in 2003?

Reloaded and Revolutions were shot back to back, with the video game Enter the Matrix filmed alongside them using the same cast.

The Matrix Reloaded broke which film's record to become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of its time?

Terminator 2: Judgment Day held the R-rated record until Reloaded's $741.8 million haul passed it in 2003; that mark stood until Deadpool overtook it in 2016.

How many days did it take to film the Burly Brawl, Neo's fight against dozens of Smiths, in Reloaded?

The Burly Brawl took 27 days to shoot and reportedly cost around $40 million, with Hugo Weaving's face digitally mapped onto a team of stunt doubles.

Where was Reloaded's freeway chase filmed?

The production paved its own freeway at the old Naval Air Station Alameda in California, then tore it down when filming wrapped.

Which French actor plays the Merovingian in the sequels?

Lambert Wilson plays the Merovingian, the exiled program who traffics in information; his wife Persephone, played by Monica Bellucci, hands Neo the Keymaker to punish his infidelity.

Which program, played by Helmut Bakaitis, tells Neo that he is not the first One?

The Architect, the white-bearded creator of the Matrix played by Helmut Bakaitis, delivers the trilogy's densest monologue in a room walled with television screens.

Which actress joined the sequels as Niobe, captain of the Logos?

Jada Pinkett Smith plays Niobe, captain of the Logos; she returned for Resurrections in 2021 as the same character some sixty years on, by then a general.

In Reloaded, Smith escapes into the real world by overwriting the mind of which crew member?

Bane, played by Ian Bliss, is overwritten by Smith through a hardline; in Revolutions Bliss does an uncanny Hugo Weaving impression before blinding Neo with a live power cable.

What Greenwich time did The Matrix Revolutions open simultaneously in 108 territories?

Revolutions opened at 14:00 GMT on November 5, 2003, which meant 6 a.m. screenings in Los Angeles, 9 a.m. in New York and 11 p.m. in Tokyo.

Which actress took over as the Oracle in Revolutions after the original actress died?

Mary Alice replaced Gloria Foster, who died in 2001; Revolutions explains the Oracle's new face as the price she paid for helping Neo, a rare recasting written into canon.

At the start of Revolutions, Neo's consciousness is trapped in a subway station called what?

Mobil Ave, an anagram of Limbo, is the station where Neo is stuck between the Matrix and the machine world; it is run by the Trainman, a program loyal to the Merovingian.

What does Neo offer the machine leader, the Deus Ex Machina, in exchange for peace?

Neo offers to stop Smith, who has become a virus the machines cannot control; he lets Smith assimilate him so the machines can purge the program through his body, ending the war at the cost of his life.

How does Trinity die in The Matrix Revolutions?

The machines later recover her body, which is how she can return, renamed Tiffany, in Resurrections.

How many animated shorts make up The Animatrix?

The Animatrix collects nine shorts from seven directors, including Shinichiro Watanabe and Peter Chung; the Wachowskis wrote four of the segments but directed none.

Which Animatrix short, animated by Square, was shown in cinemas before the film Dreamcatcher?

Final Flight of the Osiris, animated by Square, leads directly into Reloaded: the Osiris crew die getting word to Zion that the machines are drilling toward it.

In Resurrections, what is the day job of the man Neo has been made to believe he is?

Video-game designer: in Resurrections Thomas Anderson is the celebrated creator of a hit game trilogy called The Matrix, built from fragments of his half-remembered life as Neo.

Which actor plays the Analyst, the therapist who built the new Matrix, in Resurrections?

Neil Patrick Harris plays the Analyst, Anderson's therapist who prescribes him blue pills and turns out to have designed the new Matrix; Jonathan Groff plays Anderson's business partner, the new Smith.

Who directed The Matrix Resurrections?

Lana Wachowski directed alone; Lilly sat it out, and the film reached cinemas and HBO Max on the same day, December 22, 2021.

Which comic-book writer has claimed the Wachowskis essentially plagiarised his series The Invisibles?

Grant Morrison, whose series The Invisibles ran from 1994, has said the Wachowskis lifted its ideas wholesale; a separate 2003 plagiarism suit by writer Sophia Stewart was dismissed.

The Matrix Online, the MMORPG that continued the story after Revolutions, was shut down in which year?

The Matrix Online launched in March 2005 and had Morpheus assassinated in-game that same year; Sony Online Entertainment shut the servers down on August 1, 2009.

Which 1996 Wachowski film's success persuaded Warner Bros. to greenlight The Matrix?

Bound, the 1996 neo-noir thriller starring Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly, was the Wachowskis' directing debut; its success convinced Joel Silver and Warner Bros. they could handle The Matrix.

Which French actor declined Agent Smith rather than relocate to Australia for the shoot?

Jean Reno turned down Agent Smith rather than spend months shooting in Sydney; the role went to Hugo Weaving, an Australia-based actor who had never headlined a Hollywood film.

How many days did principal photography on the first Matrix film take?

Principal photography took 118 days, running from March into September 1998; it opened with low-exertion scenes like the office and interrogation room while Reeves recovered from neck surgery.

Which Nebuchadnezzar crew member is Tank's brother and the ship's pilot?

Dozer, played by Anthony Ray Parker, pilots the Nebuchadnezzar; like his brother Tank he was born in Zion and has no ports, and Cypher kills him with a lightning rifle.

What is the name of the software company where Thomas Anderson works by day?

MetaCortex is the software firm where Mr. Anderson is a respectable programmer by day; by night he sells illegal programs from his apartment, and Choi's payment for one disc is $2,000.

Roughly how many cars did General Motors donate to be wrecked in Reloaded's freeway chase?

General Motors donated about 300 cars, and all of them were wrecked; afterwards around 97 percent of the set materials were recycled, with the wood shipped to Mexico for low-income housing.

Which comic-book writer scripted the continuing storyline of The Matrix Online?

Paul Chadwick, creator of the comic Concrete, wrote The Matrix Online's continuing storyline under the Wachowskis' oversight; he had also drawn stories for the official Matrix Comics.

Which studio developed the 2003 video game Enter the Matrix?

Shiny Entertainment, the Earthworm Jim studio, developed Enter the Matrix; owner Interplay sold Shiny to Infogrames for $47 million mid-development, and the game shipped on the same day as Reloaded.

Alongside Niobe, which Logos crew member is playable in Enter the Matrix?

Ghost is the Logos's first mate, a philosophy-quoting marksman who shares the game's second campaign with Niobe; he and Trinity call each other 'dear brother' and 'dear sister'.

Which martial-arts star declined Seraph, not wanting his moves digitally recorded?

Jet Li passed; Michelle Yeoh was considered next but was busy with The Touch, and Collin Chou ended up as the Oracle's golden-coded guardian.

Which actor plays the Keymaker, the apron-wearing program held by the Merovingian?

He said the character belonged in The Wind in the Willows, wandered into Alice in Wonderland, then got lost in the Matrix; Lana suggested he halve his stride into a scurry.

Which real-life identical twins play the Merovingian's intangible henchmen in Reloaded?

Neil and Adrian Rayment play the Twins, the dreadlocked ghost-like programs who can turn intangible; Morpheus slices a tyre of their Cadillac Escalade on the freeway and sends it rolling.

Which motorcycle does Trinity ride against oncoming traffic with the Keymaker in Reloaded?

Trinity rides a Ducati 996, for which the Keymaker conveniently holds the ignition key; veteran stunt rider Debbie Evans did much of the riding against the traffic.

Which agency's records did Trinity famously crack, earning her fame among hackers?

Trinity cracked the IRS database, the hack Neo brings up when they first meet at the club; he admits he had assumed she was a guy.

At its peak in 2004 and 2005, where did Trinity rank among US girls' baby names?

Trinity peaked at 48th in 2004 and 2005; it had sat at 523rd in 1998, jumped to 209th the year the film came out and 74th in 2000, and stayed in the top 100 until 2012.

Fishburne was told to base Morpheus on a character from which comic series?

The Sandman, Neil Gaiman's comic, has its own Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams; at the studio's request Gaiman later wrote a promotional short story, 'Goliath', set in the film's world.

Which actor plays Link, the operator who replaces Tank aboard the Nebuchadnezzar?

Harold Perrineau plays Link, the Nebuchadnezzar's new operator in the sequels; he is married to Zee, sister of Tank and Dozer, and Perrineau went on to play Michael Dawson in Lost.

What nickname do Sparks and Captain Ballard give the abrasive Commander Lock?

Born in Zion, Lock cannot jack into the Matrix at all, which partly explains his impatience with Morpheus's prophecy talk.

Which champion boxer plays Captain Ballard of the hovercraft Caduceus in Reloaded?

Roy Jones Jr., the four-division boxing champion, plays Ballard; his ship the Caduceus is doomed when the Smith-possessed Bane fires its EMP early, leaving the Zion fleet helpless against the Sentinels.

Which singer was originally cast as Zee in the Matrix sequels?

Aaliyah had shot some scenes as Zee before dying in a plane crash in August 2001; the part was recast and reshot with Nona Gaye, daughter of Marvin Gaye.

Which actor plays the Trainman, the dishevelled exile who controls the trains in Revolutions?

Bruce Spence, the Gyro Captain from Mad Max 2, plays the Trainman; Neo's powers do not work in his station, so the scruffy exile beats him easily.

Who provides the voice of the Deus Ex Machina, the machine leader Neo bargains with?

Kevin Michael Richardson, the prolific voice actor who played the Joker in The Batman, voices the Deus Ex Machina; its face is a swarm of tiny machines pouring from hatches to form a human likeness.

What is the name of Sati's father, the program who trades for her passage into the Matrix?

The price was the Oracle's termination code, which the Merovingian used to force her into a new shell, explaining her recasting.

Which actress plays the grown-up Sati in The Matrix Resurrections?

Priyanka Chopra Jonas plays the grown-up Sati; Tanveer K. Atwal played the child in Revolutions, and sixty years on Sati reveals her father designed the Anomaleum that held Neo and Trinity.

What is the name of the hovercraft captained by Bugs in Resurrections?

The Mnemosyne is Bugs's ship, named for the Greek goddess of memory, fitting for a crew that rescues a man whose memories were wiped.

In Resurrections, what is the new city where humans and machines live together called?

Io is the new city, founded with help from sympathetic machines after a machine civil war over dwindling power; an elderly Niobe runs it as its general.

Under what code name did Resurrections start production in San Francisco in 2020?

Project Ice Cream was the cover name; filming began in San Francisco in February 2020, and after a month the COVID-19 shutdown halted everything until August, when work resumed in Berlin.

Which duo scored The Matrix Resurrections?

Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer scored Resurrections, having already worked with Lana Wachowski on Cloud Atlas and Sense8; Tykwer also directed Run Lola Run.

Which 1967 song features prominently in the trailer and film for Resurrections?

White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane's 1967 hit, runs through the trailer and film; the band began as the house act at a San Francisco club called The Matrix.

Roughly what was the production budget of The Matrix Resurrections?

Resurrections cost about $190 million and grossed only around $160 million worldwide, a bomb blamed partly on its same-day HBO Max release, which prompted a lawsuit from co-financier Village Roadshow.

Who was announced in 2024 to write and direct a fifth Matrix film, the first without a Wachowski directing?

Drew Goddard takes the chair, with Lana Wachowski staying on as executive producer.

Which John Wick director, once Keanu Reeves's stunt double, plays Tiffany's husband in The Matrix Resurrections?

Chad Stahelski, Reeves's stunt double on the original trilogy and later director of John Wick, plays Tiffany's husband Chad in Resurrections, a wink to long-time fans.

In The Animatrix, which household robot commits the first killing of a human?

B1-66ER, a domestic robot, kills its owner rather than be deactivated; it pleads self-defence at trial, loses and is destroyed, triggering the purge that drives the machines to found their own nation.

In the Animatrix short World Record, what time does Dan Davis clock in his final 100 m?

Dan Davis clocks 8.72 seconds, a burst of effort that briefly tears his mind loose from the Matrix; Agents wipe his memory and leave him in a wheelchair, but he still whispers 'Free'.

What is the Kid's real name in the Animatrix short Kid's Story?

Michael Karl Popper is the Kid, who frees himself by leaping from the school roof, a 'self-substantiation' thought impossible; he later reloads Mifune's APU in the Battle of Zion.

In The Second Renaissance, what is the desert nation founded by exiled machines called?

Zero One, built by exiled machines in the cradle of civilisation, floods human markets with cheap, superior products; the UN rejects its bid for membership and nukes it, which the machines survive.

What codename did humanity give its plan to shroud the sky and starve the machines?

Operation Dark Storm scorched the sky to cut the machines off from solar power; it backfired, as the machines turned to harvesting bioelectricity from captured human bodies, and then from everyone.

Which Propellerheads track plays over the first film's lobby shootout?

Spybreak!, by British big-beat duo Propellerheads, runs under the lobby shootout in which Neo and Trinity fight their way in to rescue Morpheus; it also appears on the soundtrack album.

Which band's 'Dissolved Girl' plays in Neo's headphones when Trinity first contacts him?

Massive Attack's 'Dissolved Girl', from the 1998 album Mezzanine, plays while Neo sleeps at his desk before Trinity's message; it never made the soundtrack album.

The score cue 'Bow Whisk Orchestra', heard in the dojo fight, is an anagram of what?

'Bow Whisk Orchestra' rearranges to 'Wachowski Brothers', the credit the siblings used before coming out as women; a companion cue, 'Switch or Break Show', hides the same phrase.

The choir in Revolutions' climactic cue 'Neodämmerung' sings extracts in which language?

The choir sings Sanskrit verses from the Upanishads, which the Wachowskis brought Davis after he objected to a huge choir singing plain oohs and aahs; the lines return in the credits track 'Navras'.

Which electronic act's track 'Zion' soundtracks the cave rave in Reloaded?

Fluke's 'Zion' drives the torchlit temple rave in Reloaded and sits on the film's soundtrack album alongside Rage Against the Machine, Rob Dougan and Juno Reactor.

Which country initially banned Reloaded over its violence and questions of human creation?

Egypt's censors banned Reloaded in 2003, objecting to its violence and to ideas they said touched on 'the three divine religions'; the film still broke opening records elsewhere.

Reloaded was screened out of competition at which 2003 film festival?

Reloaded screened out of competition at Cannes on May 15, 2003, the day it opened worldwide; it had premiered in Westwood, Los Angeles on May 7 and took $91.7 million in its first US weekend.

Revolutions opened simultaneously in regular cinemas and which format, a live-action first?

Revolutions was the first live-action film released day-and-date in IMAX and regular cinemas, on November 5, 2003; its worldwide opening weekend of about $200 million was a record at the time.

Revolutions' subway scenes were shot in disused tunnels of which Sydney railway station?

St James station's disused tunnels, off Hyde Park in Sydney, doubled as the limbo subway station; the same tunnels include a flooded section nicknamed the St James Lake.

Which film overtook Reloaded as 2003's top-grossing release in July of that year?

Finding Nemo passed Reloaded at the US box office in July 2003 and finished the year second worldwide behind Return of the King, with Reloaded third; Reloaded held the R-rated worldwide record for 13 years.

Which helicopter does Trinity pilot to rescue Morpheus in the first film?

The Bell 212 was a full-scale lightweight mock-up hung from the studio roof beams for the rooftop rescue, fitted with a real minigun firing at half its normal rate so the camera could see the rounds.

Which handgun is standard issue for Agents inside the Matrix?

The Desert Eagle, chambered for .50 AE rounds, is the Agents' sidearm; Smith's earpiece, not his gun, is his real link to the system, and removing it leaves him blind to the attack on his building.

How much weight did Reeves lose for the scene where Neo wakes in his pod?

Reeves lost 15 pounds and shaved his whole body so Neo would look wasted and hairless when he wakes in the goo-filled pod.