The Matrix Resurrections cast discuss nostalgia, action, and the 'live environment' on set

Who better to lead a download around the latest Matrix movie than the cast of Resurrections?

Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Priyanka Chopra, Jonathan Groff, and Jessica Henwick dove deep into the making of The Matrix Resurrections in EW's latest installment of Around the Table, from the meaning of nostalgia to giving new spins on old characters to the intense action to the "live environment" created by director Lana Wachowski on set.

"The experience of nostalgia in the film is comforting, but it's also confrontational in the sense of, what is nostalgia?" Reeves says to the former point. "Yes, it can give comfort, but it can also ask questions. Where I was in the past and now here I am. How did I get here? How do I feel about the past? It's like, did the past even happen?"

Lana and Lilly Wachowski wrote and directed the original three Matrix movies together, but Lana helmed Resurrections solo. The film sees the return of Neo (Reeves) and Trinity (Moss), after they visibly died during the events of 2003's The Matrix Revolutions. Their minds are somehow trapped back inside the Matrix, the virtual world projected into the minds of humans by machines far in the future to keep them ignorant of their apocalyptic reality. And they appear to have no memories of their lives together.

That is, until a blue-haired, gunslinging hacker by the name of Bugs (Henwick) and a man named Morpheus (Abdul-Mateen) — even if he's not the same Morpheus originated by Laurence Fishburne — enter the scene to wake the man known as the One back up.

Chopra, playing a grown-up Sati, the little girl (but she's really a program) from Revolutions, said Wachowski created a "live environment" on set. Her colleagues agreed they had to come to work prepared for the unexpected.

"I live for that moment after the director says, 'action,'" Reeves says. "And it really amplified that moment that I love. What the heck's gonna happen? You can prepare and you can have your ideas and stuff, but after someone says action you don't really know and you want to be whatever that is."

The Matrix Resurrections is now playing in theaters and on HBO Max. Watch the full Around the Table in the video above.

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