Michael Keaton - Between Batman And Birdman

What happened to Mrs Douglas's little boy between playing a comic-book icon and essaying a washed-up star of a super hero franchise.

Michael Keaton wasn’t born Michael Keaton. He was born Michael Douglas.

For a while in the late ’80s and early ’90s, two Michael Douglases ruled Hollywood. Of course, one of them, the one related to Kirk Douglas and married to Catherine Zeta Jones, remains a prominent figure on the parched LA landscape. But what about his former namesake? Ron Howard’s actor-of-choice; the man behind Beetlejuice; the cat handed Batman’s cowl by Tim Burton – just whatever happened to Michael Keaton?

Of course, we now know the answer is that he wound up starring in the Oscar-winning Birdman. When asked what he made of Alejando Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman, Hot Fuzz director Edward Wright said that the picture, “Floats from comedy to surrealism to high drama to quiet brilliance. It reaches for the sky and never comes back down to earth.” Which sounds pretty high falutin’ but is actually a fine description of a film about a washed-up actor and the superhero character he used to play on screen.

Given his Dark Knight days, Michael Keaton would seem tailor-made for the role of Riggan Thomas. Not that his brace of Batman movies were the reason for his fall from high estate. On the contrary, essaying Bruce Wayne’s alter-ego opened up all sorts of interesting opportunities. From a top psycho turn in Pacific Heights to a stab at Shakespeare in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing; Michael Keaton was as versatile as he was in demand. No sooner had his career caught fire then it just as quickly sputtered out.

In fact, just one year after a strong supporting turn in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown – he’d reprise the part of smug FBI agent Ray Nicollete in Out Of Sight – Michael Keaton’s career hit rock bottom courtesy of something called Jack Frost. As some may remember (but most of you will hopefully have forgotten) that’s the film in which he plays a deceased family man who’s reincarnated as a snowman. Featuring special effects that would shame a ZX Spectrum, Jack Frost is the Plan Nine From Outer Space to The Snowman’s Citizen Kane.

As bad as that movie might have been, Keaton kept on working. Indeed, when he observed that “I’ve never really been away,” he was speaking the truth. Cameos in The Simpsons, King Of The Hill and Frasier; the part of Katie Holmes father in the self-explanatory First Daughter; the leading role in the decent-if-little-seen Game 6 – our man was no Howard Hughes. If his early 2000s career resembled that of anyone else, it’s Mickey Rourke who, though he claimed his Oscar nod for The Wrestler came on the back of 10 years away from acting, had actually been making B-pictures and straight-to-video productions the whole time he claimed to have been ‘in hiding’.

Michael Keaton’s ‘lost years’ were no less fruitful than Rourke’s, with his work in the 2002 TV movie Live From Baghdad bagging him a Golden Globe nomination. Still, it would be a while before his Birdman reinvention. That he spent some of that time providing the voices of Chick Hicks in Cars, Barbie’s beau Ken in Toy Story 3 and Jason Hudson in Call Of Duty: Black Ops II meant that, even though he wasn’t out of mind, Keaton remained firmly out of sight.

It’s no exaggeration to say that, for the casual moviegoer at least, Michael Keaton remained off the radar until he showed up playing bad guy Raymond Sellars in the remake of RoboCop. “I got a whole lot of people saying ‘Great to have you back,’” he told Fox when Jose Padilha’s picture was released. “It was nice to be missed even though I’ve been working all this time.”

If reports of his career demise had been premature, Keaton was quick to seize on the connection between the RoboCop body armour and his old Batsuit. “The suit [RoboCop star] Joel Kinnaman wears is a sissy suit. They had to glue my suit on. I’m very claustrophobic. When they put that suit on me, honestly, I started having panic attacks. And as for going to the bathroom, forget it!”

Can we take it then that Batman is still important to Michael Keaton? Not if what he said to Entertainment Weekly is anything to go by. “Look, Christopher Nolan is great, but I’ve never seen any of the Batman movies all the way through. I know they’re good. I just have zero interest in those kinds of movies. I mean, people were asking me, ‘Is Ben Affleck going to be any good?’ And my attitude is, firstly, why would you ask me?’ second, he’ll probably be very good; and third, frankly, it’s all set up now so that you’re weirdly kind of safe. Once you get in those suits, they know what to do with you. It was hard then; it ain’t that hard now.”

And what of Riggan Thomas? Keaton’s decision to walk away from Wayne Manor was fuelled by the very reasons that Thomas hangs up his Birdman costume, principally a lack of creative fulfilment. So is it right to see the character as an extension of himself? “The truth is that I’m playing a person, just a person. I was both as connected to Riggan Thomas and as disconnected from him as you can possibly be.”

Though his comic-book past is something of a closed book, Michael Keaton can’t say enough good things about the film that brought him back into the A-list fold: "I like this movie so much. I just can't get enough of it. The long takes, the ever-changing mood, the extraordinary scale – it’s amazing to me. I was at a preview one time and I was watching the movie for the third time and I'm thinking, God, I love this movie. And then I realised: Wait a minute, I'm in this movie!"