How Keanu Reeves Went From Action Star to Riding Giant

With Arch Motorcycle Company, actor Keanu Reeves and bike builder Gard Hollinger are turning a passion project into a thriving business.

- Chris Nelson

I knock on the door of an unmarked red brick industrial building in southwest Los Angeles, and the actor Keanu Reeves answers. He doesn’t lead me onto a movie set, but instead into a motorcycle shop— his motorcycle shop, in fact. Arch Motorcycle Company, a bespoke studio he founded with master builder Gard Hollinger in late 2011, produces tailor-made bikes for those with at least $78,000 to spare. Each example of Arch’s KRGT-1 model, pictured here, is individualized to fit a customer’s tastes and style, with creative oversight from Hollinger, who has been building custom motorcycles for the better part of three decades.

“Sometimes the second you meet somebody, you think, I’m going to be connected to that person,” says Hollinger, who has built some of the most imaginative and eccentric choppers in the world. “I remember having that feeling with Keanu.” In the mid-2000s, Reeves had begun blindly modifying his ’05 Harley-Davidson Dyna without any real purpose or objective. “I fucked it up,” jokes Reeves, who went to one of Hollinger’s earlier shops, L.A. County Choprods, hoping the self-taught designer and fabricator could transform his botch job into a beautiful custom cruiser. The belabored build wound up taking four years, continually delayed by the movie star’s busy shoot schedule. But as the bike took form over the years, Reeves and Hollinger grew close, and Reeves began bugging Hollinger about building more bikes together.