Part 3: "Boy Reeve"

Initially, the ninth of June marked a relatively routine night at Falcon, a popular Los Angeles nightclub. Frequent club attendee Arizona Hayes described the scene. “It was just the usual crowd of hipsters. Kind of boring, you know? I was thinking about bailing for the Chateau, but before I could go, this kid starts grinding all up on me!

“I was about to tell him to blow,” Hayes continues, “but then I got a real peek at him. First of all, I could tell he was younger than he looked. Seventeen, maybe, posing as twenty-one. I don’t know who let him in. But also, he was cute. I couldn’t stop staring into those big blue eyes.

"Boy Reeve" and date outside a popular LA nightspot.

“We started chatting. Bands we liked, that kind of thing. He wanted to know if I was on Facebook. Then I told him, just to make small talk, you know, ‘You must get this all the time, but you look exactly like a young Christopher Reeve.’ He gave this devilish grin and just tossed back, ‘Of course I do, baby! It’s the genome!’ Then he asked if I knew where to score some E.”¹

Over the course of the evening, the dashing lookalike popped up at a half dozen hotspots on the Sunset Strip, gradually accumulating an entourage of comely loafers and C-list celebrities. At the Saddle Ranch he ordered three rounds of mojitos for the crowd, announcing, “Charge them to Boy Reeve’s tab!”² According to popular local DJ Fanceepantz, who tagged along for most of evening, the young man then “went to the bathroom, and we lost him for about an hour. Later we found him sleeping naked in one of those boxes at the Standard.”³

Since then, “Boy Reeve” has become a fixture of the Hollywood club scene.

His remarkable resemblance to a teenage Christopher Reeve is not at all coincidental, at least according to South Korean scientist Dr. Heung Woo-Jin. Heung, a leader in the field of biomedicine, has garnered much attention in recent years for experiments with embryonic stem cells and for his inroads into the contentious field of human cloning. On June 13th, just days after Boy Reeve’s arrival had hit the press, Dr. Hueng hosted a press conference in which he proudly claimed responsibility for the existence of Boy Reeve. “Using a small sample of Christopher Reeve’s DNA, we have successfully reproduced a healthy, free-spirited, and genetically identical human being.” Hueng went on to describe the basics of his cloning process, in which a somatic cell nucleus, extracted from a single strand of the late actor’s hair, was inserted into a denucleated egg cell. The egg was then stimulated into accelerated fetal development. Thus, though Hueng and his team of scientists began their endeavor only two years ago, their high-speed growth technique yielded a clone who now appears to be a normal “teenager,” when he is actually only one-and-a-half.⁴

In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, Boy Reeve did not contradict Hueng’s explanation of his “birth,” though he was significantly more critical of the process. “Yeah, it was something, all right,” he recalled. “Months and months in that tube. Sitting under grow lights for hours on end. Drinking nothing but vitamin shakes. Dullsville, you know what I’m saying? Dr. Woo-Tang can keep it.”⁵

When asked about his reasons for cloning Reeve, Hueng was evasive. “The therapeutic possibilities offered by cloning are endless. Imagine a world in which the mind of a terminally ill person could be safely transferred into a seamlessly replicated, healthy young body. Isn’t that the kind of world Mr. Reeve strove to make a reality?”⁶

Boy Reeve poolside at the Chateau Marmont.

A source close to the Reeve family has denied that the departed thespian gave any support to Hueng’s experiment. “Chris never had any contact with Dr. Hueng. I doubt he was aware of efforts, and he certainly never gave him any money or granted him permission to collect his genetic tissue.” The source added, “Frankly, we’re all pretty offended at the suggestion that Chris would be willing to erase or overwrite the consciousness of another living being, whether that being was his clone or not.”⁷

While vague about its ultimate purpose, Dr. Hueng does acknowledge that his experiment is incomplete, admitting that Boy Reeve escaped from his laboratory before he had “grown to maturity.” At his press conference, with a tone reminiscent of a wistful father, he expressed hope that the young man would return to Seoul National University so that “together we can continue our pioneering work.”⁸

But Boy Reeve appears to have no intention of returning to “guinea pig” status, preferring the “L.A. lifestyle” and opting to focus on his “acting and modeling career.” ⁹ Talent agency William-Morris has already signed Boy Reeve, and Warner Bros. is in talks with the young heartthrob with the aim of locking a multi-picture deal.¹⁰

Still, the mainstream press has tended to view Boy Reeve as something of a dilettante, taking not only his star ambitions lightly, but also notable as the least politically-involved of the four replicant Reeves. As Air America host Randi Rhodes opined, “Here’s an individual who’s got more of a right than just about anybody to weigh in on the stem-cell debate, and he’s more concerned with banging Lindsay Lohan.”¹¹

Boy Reeve’s defenders insist that he does possess a social conscience, citing such incidents as his run-in with Scarlett Johansson at the exclusive Hollywood nightspot Butter. In a break from character, Boy Reeve confronted the star over her participation in the clone escape fantasy The Island, which he referred to as “ethically bankrupt.” In an interview with Sight & Sound magazine, Johansson admitted, “I was actually surprised by how articulate his criticisms were. I genuinely started to rethink some choices, then I realized he hadn’t broken eye-contact with my chest for ten minutes, and I had to give him a fake phone number.”¹²

CW Star Tom Welling.

One organization displaying total faith in Boy Reeve’s gravity of character is Time Warner. While grooming the youngster for the big screen, the media concern is also apparently developing a new primetime drama to showcase him on their fledgling CW network. “It’s a buddy series, starring him and Chad Michael Murray,” a studio insider leaked, “but there’ll be real heart, and a lot of edgy political content. They’re going to play sexy young physical therapists, working with spinal injuries, girls in wheelchairs, that kind of thing. But you can bet there’ll be some stem cell talk and, I don’t know, euthanasia or something. It’s House meets West Wing." ¹³

“Yeah, I mean, the show sounds great,” comments CW star Tom Welling. “Sure, the rest of us spent years training, auditioning, pounding the pavement to get to this point. And then some guy comes out of nowhere, and they throw an hour-long drama at him just because he looks good with his shirt off. How’s that fair? But, uh, yeah, we’re really excited about Boy Reeve joining the family.” ¹⁴

For more information regarding Boy Reeve, please see our Rumors page.

Next week, Part 4: Cyborg Reeve!

Sources:

¹Personal Interview with Team Atrox. 30 June 2006.

²Defamer. 12 June 2006.

³Fanceepantz's Awesome Trip Hop Shock Blog. "Boxing Baby Reeve." 10 June 2006.

⁴Castle, Melinda. "Maverick Scientist Announces Human Clone." The New York Times. 14 June 2006.

⁵Cho, Tina. "Cloned Reeve Seeks Independence." The Los Angeles Times. 15 June 2006.

⁶Castle. "Maverick." NY Times.

⁷Sandrock, Cameron. "To What End, Prometheus?" Scientific American. July 2006.

⁸Castle. "Maverick." NY Times.

⁹Green, Sawyer. "Boy Reeve, Untubed." People. July 2006.

¹⁰Tamo, Maurice. "Bros Bait Boy with Trip Flick Tick." Variety. 22 June 2006.

¹¹The Randi Rhodes Show. 28 June 2006.

¹²Greenaway, Tamzin. "Clonesploitation?" Sight & Sound. July 2006.

¹³Ain't It Cool News. "Boy Reeve Gets Physical." 26 June 2006.

¹⁴Entertainment Tonight. 29 June 2006.

Introduction •Part 1: The Ereevicator •Part 2: The Reeve of Steel •Rumors