Christian Slater was offered the role of Jonathan Harker, but he turned it down (a decision he later regretted). As for casting Keanu Reeves in the role Coppola said of his casting choice: "We tried to get some kind of matinée idol for the part of Jonathan, because it isn't such a great part. If we all were to go to the airport... Keanu is the one that the girls would just besiege.".Coppola has stated that Reeves worked harder on his accent than most people realized: "He tried so hard. That was the problem, actually — he wanted to do it perfectly and in trying to do it perfectly it came off as stilted. I tried to get him to just relax with it and not do it so fastidiously. So maybe I wasn’t as critical of him, but that’s because I like him personally so much. To this day he’s a prince in my eyes."