Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in ‘Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey’

Actor-director Alex Winter — aka Bill S. Preston Esq. himself — has revealed a whole heap of bodacious new details about the upcoming Bill & Ted 3.

Winter and co-star Keanu Reeves will return for the follow-up, which has already been 23 years in the making after 1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

The filmmaker was discussing his first acting role in a long time as a shady assistant in crafty thriller Grand Piano, but we couldn’t help but ask him about the state of the fan favourite franchise.

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“[Bill & Ted] will be 40-something and it’s all about Bill and Ted grown up, or not grown up,” Winter tells us. “It’s really sweet and really f---ing funny.

“But it’s a Bill & Ted movie, that’s what it is. It’s for the fans of Bill & Ted. It fits very neatly in the [series]. It’s not going to feel like a reboot. The conceit is really funny: What if you’re middle-aged, haven’t really grown up and you’re supposed to have saved the world and maybe, just maybe, you kinda haven’t?”

“There’s many versions of ourselves in this movie,” he continues. “[It’s] answering the question: ‘What happened to these guys?’ They’re supposed to have done all this stuff, they weren’t the brightest bulbs on the tree, what happened 20 years later? To answer that question in a comedic way felt rich with possibility.”

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But fans expecting something to see in the near future had better prepare for disappointment.

“The thing we had going against us is that word got out,” he explains. “That was kind of a bummer. It just takes a long time to put a movie together. Now we’re having to build this thing in public, which is fine. I just feel bad [the fans] have to get dragged through this long, boring, protracted process.”

Above all, it’s good to hear that the members of Wyld Stallyns are still good mates off-screen.

“Me and Keanu and [original writers] Chris [Matheson] and Ed [Solomon] are all very close and have remained close over the years,” says Winter. “We’d be having dinner and we’d be like, ‘is there a point? Is there a way in?’ We’d kick an idea around and go no and we would leave it alone for a bunch of years. I guess about four years ago we had an idea together that we thought was pretty great. I think it was because so much time had gone by that it was great.