In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the actor returns to a role now enshrined in pop culture — with 35 years of ups and downs and an Oscar nomination under his belt.
There’s a scene in the upcoming indie dramedy Goodrich where Michael Keaton’s character, a Los Angeles art dealer lost in the weeds of a late-midlife crisis, agrees to attend a breath workshop to win over a New Age-y prospective client. As setups go, it’s something of a soft target: a fish-out-of-water boomer, drowning in California woo-woo.
But the actor, his face a small hurricane of hope and anxiety, does more than find his “higher vibration”. He bobs and weaves and tries some kind of freestyle tai chi; he bats at a swarm of invisible bees and unleashes a primal scream (more like a strangled yelp, really). This is the Keaton that Goodrich writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer envisioned when she conceived the screenplay.
“I wrote it 100% with him in mind,” she said, “to the point where if he had said no, I would have buried it and myself in the backyard.”
And it’s the same sense of unpredictability, a certain wild-card gleam, that has compelled filmmaker Tim Burton to cast Keaton in five movies over nearly four decades, including, most recently, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. “When you just look at Michael in Beetlejuice or even Batman, he has this sort of look in his eye,” Burton said. “That’s why I wanted him to be Batman, because you just look at him and go, ‘This is a guy who would dress up like a bat.’ You know what I mean? There’s something behind the eyes that’s just very intelligent, funny and dangerous and kind of crazy.”
The Keaton who settled into the corner booth of a hushed midtown Manhattan hotel lounge on a late-August morning didn’t seem like much of a maniac. Dressed in the dapper cool-dad uniform of fine-gauge knitwear and fitted slacks, he was still whippet-slim at 72 (he turned 73 on Thursday) and so soft-spoken in person that it was sometimes a strain to hear him over the cappuccino machine.
But those bevelled eyebrows and Cheshire cat smile were very much intact, as was the kinetic free-jazz energy of his breakout role in the 1982 Ron Howard comedy Night Shift. Even the arrival of drip coffee prompted a sort of delighted bebop monologue: “All right, man! Perfection. Perfect, perfect, perfect.”
That level of personal pizazz may feel unfamiliar to viewers who most recently saw Keaton as a kindhearted country doctor who tumbles into OxyContin addiction in the 2021 limited series Dopesick, for which he won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe, or caught his more subdued, serious turns in speaking-truth-to-power dramas like Spotlight and The Trial of The Chicago 7. Few parts, though, have synthesised his gifts for bridging comedy and drama as deftly as Birdman, the bravura 2014 Alejandro Iñárritu fantasy that earned Keaton his first best actor nod at the Academy Awards and took home four Oscars, including best picture.
That performance, which required the star of two Batman films to play a washed-up actor who had once been a superhero, was widely billed as a comeback after several fallow years in Hollywood. Keaton understands the narrative, even if he doesn’t quite agree with it. “Look, there was a period where it was a combination of I had zero interest, I wasn’t in anything good, I wasn’t good,” he said. “No one was knocking on my door. The one thing I will credit myself for is that I never got desperate. Never get desperate. You know that stuff hovering over the LA basin when you fly in? That’s actually desperation.”
He has, you could say, safely cleared the smog line. His 2024 release schedule includes the low-key drama Knox Goes Away, in which he directs and stars as a hit man with a fast-moving form of dementia; Goodrich; and, as you may have been informed by various blaring billboards and multiplex marquees, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – the 35-years-in-gestation sequel to Beetlejuice that reunites him and Burton as well as several of the original movie’s stars, including Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara.
For a long time, both Keaton and Burton wavered over whether there should be any follow-up at all, even as they continued to collaborate (including on an ambitious live-action Dumbo, released in 2019). When the two men first met in the late 1980s and began workshopping the look and feel of Keaton’s Beetlejuice character – a puckish undead trickster with a taste for cockroaches and jailhouse-stripe suits – they were largely winging it. “It was Tim’s first big movie,” Keaton recalled. “I mean, he had done Pee-wee’s Big Adventure before. But it was the two of us, with almost no one looking over our shoulders, saying, ‘I don’t know – what do you think of this?’ ‘Oh cool, I love that! You know what would be fun? If I go and do X, Y, Z.’ It was just freaking glorious. So to do that again, to re-create that, is asking a lot of writers.”
Over several decades, spec scripts came and went; none of them quite hit the spot. “I’ve done reboots, rehabs, re-whatevers,” Burton said. “I don’t care about any of that. I wanted to do this because of Michael and Catherine and Winona.” The new storyline they finally settled on, a bit of a gothic lark that finds the family of O’Hara’s and Ryder’s characters once again terrorised by unwelcome visitors from the afterlife, was expanded to include Jenna Ortega, the deadpan young star of Burton’s hit Netflix series Wednesday, and the sultry Italian actress Monica Bellucci as Beetlejuice’s vengeful, long-estranged wife.
That left somewhat limited screen time for the man who actually plays Beetlejuice – by design, according to Keaton. “I said, ‘Tim, If I ever do this again, I cannot be in it more than I was in the first one. Really, that would be a huge mistake.’ He said, ‘I already know that.’ I said, ‘And No 2, it has to feel handmade like our first one – less, less, less, if any, technology.’ And he was way ahead of me there. You almost want to see a little bit of plywood, you know what I mean?” Indeed, there’s a certain nail-gun-and-spackle handicraft to the result, a knowingly camp echo of the original film’s ramshackle art-school spirit.
There is a difference, of course, between the constraints of a major studio film so entrenched in the popular imagination that it went on to become both a ride at Universal Studios and a long-running Broadway show, and the actual strictures of independent filmmaking.
Between jobs perhaps most notable for their paycheck value, like the recently shelved Batgirl and various animated voice roles (Cars, Toy Story 3, Minions), Keaton has increasingly turned his focus to smaller, more personal projects.
Knox Goes Away is one of those, a quiet story that required the actor to play a professional killer and failed family man – he’s divorced and hasn’t spoken to his grown son, played by James Marsden, for decades – who finds that he has an aggressive brain disease. Polish actress Joanna Kulig (Cold War) co-stars, as do Marcia Gay Harden and a nicely mensch-y Al Pacino.
It’s a melancholy, mercurial film, both wistful and bloody, with an intricate crime subplot baked into the script. It’s also the second time, oddly, that Keaton has both helmed and starred in a film about a hit man, after The Merry Gentleman in 2008. (“I wish I could be in any Michael Keaton film,” Pacino said. “Either acting with him or being directed by him.”)
The similarities at first gave Keaton pause, as did the inherent violence of the subject matter. “Here’s the really weird thing,” he said. “I don’t particularly like those kinds of movies. First of all, there are people who make them a zillion times better than I can. I also feel like we’re too glib about guns, man. It’s still life; it’s still death.”
But he liked the way it forced his character to confront the loss of control. “I wanted to see if I could pull off this guy’s demise, his losing his faculties, his deterioration, and then shoot it in, like, 25 days,” he said. “Could I make it believable?”
Life-or-death stakes are certainly less literal in the breezy and bittersweet Goodrich, though knotty issues of family and mortality still apply. In the movie, Keaton plays Andy Goodrich, a hustling careerist whose art business starts to fail around the same time that his second wife leaves him with their 9-year-old twins and his adult daughter (Mila Kunis) is preparing to give birth to her first child.
Despite their fraught on-screen relationship, Kunis found it easy to connect with Keaton when they first met for dinner several weeks before shooting. “He’s got a well-rounded life around him,” she said. “Your job should not be who you are, and I think that that’s why people sometimes get lost in this industry. They become their job. And for Michael, who he is and what he does are two different things.” Also, she added with a laugh, “He’s very big on the word ‘kiddo.’ On set, off set, it was always ‘kiddo.’”
Both Knox and Goodrich are, to some degree, about the failures and regrets of parenting: two very different portraits of absentee dads hoping to redeem themselves before the clock runs out. In his personal life, though, tales of family dysfunction don’t appear to hold much draw for Keaton. The youngest of seven children born and raised in a blue-collar Catholic household outside Pittsburgh, he recalled growing up with “three of the greatest sisters and the greatest mum,” along with three older brothers and “a lot of wild friends”. The picture he painted was of an outdoorsy, happily analogue childhood, heavy on daredevilry and shenanigans – somewhere between Animal House and Huckleberry Finn.
So when success came to him in the early ‘80s after two years of studying at Kent State and a wobbly stint in stand-up – he opened once for Cher and bombed – Keaton promptly bought a ranch near Big Timber, Montana, where he still lives for much of the year. And while his marriage to actress Caroline McWilliams ended in 1990 (she died in 2010), being present as a dad took precedence over certain professional considerations. “I could have made tons more movies, made much more money,” he said. “But I had a son because I wanted to be a father. I mean, I just enjoyed it.”
Keaton’s evident pride in his only child, Sean Douglas, a songwriter and music producer with two kids of his own, is often displayed on the actor’s Instagram, where he has close to 1 million followers. It’s an outlet made all the more endearing for the unpolished nature of Keaton’s posts, which often feel Tim Walz-like in their folksy liberalism and unchecked enthusiasm. (Popular subjects include fishing, baseball, politics, grandchildren and haphazard screenshots of his television; whole odes have been written to their blurred, wonky charms on the internet, generally by millennial and Gen Z fans.)
His reputation as Montana Man tends to precede him now in every celebrity profile, though Keaton dispelled the perception that he is some kind of lone-wolf homesteader on the range, living out a River Runs Through It redux. “I have almost as many friends there now as I do in New York and LA and all over the world,” he said. “And it’s always attracted writers and eccentrics and painters. It ain’t Hicksville, let’s say.” He does seem to have an active social life; his conversation was peppered with casual references to his good buddies Carville (that would be political consultant James Carville) and actor Griffin Dunne but also to many acquaintances with no IMDb pages at all.
“I love people that still have a sense of ‘you don’t know everything about them,’ you know what I mean? We’re in this world where everybody knows everything about everybody, and it kind of loses its mystique a little bit,” said Burton, with whom Keaton has maintained an enduring if unlikely bond over the years: cinema’s high-goth prince of darkness and America’s fly-fishing dad. “Michael comes into the room, and he’s like a prizefighter. He dances into the ring just for a little bit, and then he gets out of the race.”
Keaton saw it slightly differently. “I’m the ultimate cake-and-eat-it-too guy. I admit I am,” he said, his eyes still bright over a cooling cup of coffee. “People say, ‘Well, it doesn’t work like that.’ And I say, ‘It’s worked pretty well for me.’”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Leah Greenblatt
Photographs by: Geordie Wood
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
