Gianna's Disturbing Death In John Wick 2 Was All Keanu Reeves' Idea

By our count, there are over 300 characters killed in the first three "John Wick" movies, and that's not even counting this year's "John Wick: Chapter 4," which added another hundred or so deaths to the mix. As a hitman, Keanu Reeves' gun-fu-fighting protagonist inhabits a kill-or-be-killed world, and usually, he's the one carrying out the slaughter. However, one of the most brutal deaths in Mr. Wick's movie repertoire was assisted by his target.

In "John Wick: Chapter 2," Wick has to honor an old marker he swore in order to retire and marry the love of his life. He doesn't want to go through with the kill at first, and only does so reluctantly when he's threatened with expulsion from the underworld and the loss of protection he enjoys. (The guy holding that marker also blows his house up with a grenade launcher.) This leads Wick to Rome, where he pays a visit to crime boss and newly coronated High Table member Gianna (Claudia Gerini), who knows her time is up as soon as Wick appears over her shoulder.

What wasn't always so certain is how exactly Gianna would die. In a 2017 interview with Empire to promote "John Wick: Chapter 2," director Chad Stahelski said that Reeves himself devised the manner of her death:

"We had it a couple of different ways: it was in her mansion, her house, and something wasn't feeling right. We thought, 'how many times have you seen somebody in a room?' One day, Keanu's in our office, he's just got done working out, we're talking, and he says 'I've got an idea. It's a little wacky. I'm not going to kill Gianna. She's gonna slit her wrists in a bath house. She's gonna strip. It's gonna be confusing. We'll put this tension in.'"

Keanu Reeves seems like such a nice guy in real life that it's a little surprising to know the image of Gianna's ghastly end in "John Wick: Chapter 2" originated with him. However, as an actor conscious of how his character might be perceived, Reeves may have come up with the way Gianna dies partly because he knew it would be harder to root for his character if he just showed up and murdered a woman in cold blood.

At the same time, it's almost just as disturbing to see Gianna strip down naked and stand there, dripping blood all over herself, before she sinks down in the hot tub and the water turns red. Chad Stahelski recognized that her death would be "pretty hardcore" and "a little creepy," but he told Empire:

"I couldn't get it out of my head. We started sketching, I called my production designer and said 'bear with me on this'. It fitted the Wick world — that's just the way these people live. I thought it was a good way to show another side of the mythology. It's supposed to be this world with its own set of rules."

Technically, Wick still kills Gianna by shooting her in the head as she bleeds out. And if he hadn't shown up in her mirror like the grim reaper, she wouldn't have done what she did in the first place. If there's any consolation, though, it's as she says: "I lived my life my way, and I'll die my way." John Wick is there to hold her hand, too, before he pulls the trigger, which lends Gianna's otherwise gruesome death a gentle touch that the most brutal kills in his movie series lack.