Entertainment Weekly has a post upon the new characters in Toy Story 4. Director Josh Colley said the following about Keanu:
“I didn’t know Keanu was Canadian, and I did not know that he had a motorcycle company, until after we cast him. We always had this character, who was always this bravado Canadian stuntman, and in my head, I had this one [idea] of how it would be performed, but then we met with Keanu and before he even signed on, he wanted to have lunch. And once he came to the table, he started asking all these great questions and doing different voices and actually jumped up on the table in the middle of Pixar to act out the character and his great ideas that we didn’t have in there originally. It was really incredible. Keanu really did help craft that character in a huge, huge way.”
Keanu said the following on his character:
“I definitely wanted to give him energy and a big personality. But I also saw him as a character that has a really wide dramatic bandwidth in the sense of being so big. Kaboom! Kapow! Let’s go! But who can also then share his wounds, like, ‘You have a kid? I had a kid. I let him down!’ And he can get quiet. So it was really a lot to play with on the playground.”