Dave Camarillo is a veteran Judo and BJJ black belt who worked on John Wick: Chapter 4 to co-ordinate stunts and fightscenes, and footage has gone viral of him teaching Keanu Reeves a beautiful flying triangle choke counter to a single-leg takedown along with a transition into an armbar at the end. Reeves plays the titular character in the series of John Wick films and the fourth instalment in the franchise premiered on March 6th, 2023. Shortly after the film was released; Reeves, Camarillo, and the director Chad Stahelski auctioned off an exclusive gi from the production that was signed by all three men in order to raise money for charity.
While Reeves is an actor first and foremost, he has been in a number of action films over the years that have required him to learn relatively advanced techniques and perform them to a convincing degree on camera. This kind of performance obviously requires a pretty good understanding of the technique at bare minimum, otherwise it simply wouldn’t work. That’s where people like Camarillo come into it, as veteran martial artists have been on hand throughout Reeves’ acting career to teach him how to perform these techniques correctly.
Camarillo is a phenomenal grappler with decades of experience in both Judo and BJJ, even before he was known as a fantastic coach. He started out with Judo, training under his father at just 5 years old and continuing all throughout his childhood multiple times a week. He even went to Japan, the home of the sport, to train before he got introduced to BJJ under Cesar Gracie and Ralph Gracie. He worked his way up the belt ranks quickly and competed several times during his journey, before making his way to American Kickboxing Academy as a coach and eventually opening up ‘Guerrilla Jiu-Jitsu’.
The footage of Dave Camarillo teaching Keanu Reeves how to do a flying Triangle Choke and transition into an armbar afterward was uploaded to his official Instagram account:
