Keanu Reeves was mistaken for Sean Connery at House of Nanking in 1997, and the mix-up ended up living on in The Matrix Resurrections. What started as a restaurant photo in San Francisco’s Chinatown later became a visible piece of the finished film, with the old picture hanging behind Neo on screen.
House of Nanking in 1997
Peter Fang told Kathy to come take a picture and said, “It’s him! It’s Sean Connery!” Reeves did not bristle at the mistake. He thanked Peter and said he was deeply honored to be mistaken for an actor as talented as Sean Connery, a response Kathy remembered as gentlemanly.
Kathy used a disposable camera and took the photo before Reeves left. That print stayed by the front window at House of Nanking for decades, turning a brief encounter into part of the room’s visual history. For a restaurant that already ran on a strict line policy, the image became one more thing regulars could spot without any announcement.
February 2020 in San Francisco
In February 2020, Reeves came back to San Francisco to film The Matrix Resurrections, and House of Nanking was chosen as a location. Kathy was 36 weeks pregnant while the restaurant was being used for the film, and the family signed NDAs after a producer reached out about a secret project. That kept the place working as a restaurant while a movie set was being built around it.
The crew then made a cleaner, better copy of the old photo so it could keep hanging by the window. Fans later spotted the original image of a younger Reeves on the wall behind Neo in the finished movie, which turned a long-ignored snapshot into a deliberate on-screen Easter egg.
Kathy and Caleb Sima
Kathy and Caleb Sima had planned to name their son Hawk before changing it to Neo, which fits the way this story keeps folding back on itself. House of Nanking also included the yang chun noodle soup that inspired Neo’s onscreen bowl in a cookbook with more than 100 recipes, tying the restaurant’s food to the film’s visual language as neatly as the photo tied the film back to the dining room.
Peter and Lily were still working at the restaurant at ages 75 and 76, so the photo was never just memorabilia; it was part of a living place that kept moving while the movie came back through. The unresolved point is simple: Peter reached for Sean Connery’s name because that was the face he thought he saw, and the restaurant made that mistake last by putting the picture back into The Matrix Resurrections in cleaner form.
