Michael Keaton, Hollywood’s last maverick

What I’ve loved about Michael Keaton, from Mr Mom to Birdman to Spotlight – what I want so badly to be true about him in person – is that he’s both cool and intense. Glib and passionate, a yin-yang of dismissiveness and mania, Jack Nicholson crossed with Jim Carrey. He doesn’t care what others think, but cares deeply about creating great work. 

I press the button on the gate of his house in western Los Angeles, a few miles from the beach. Inviting me here is a good sign of not caring, since most actors will do anything to keep a snoopy journalist from judging their cleanliness, decor and hosting skills. An assistant comes to get me, which is a bad sign, especially on a Sunday morning. But then Keaton emerges to greet me in a blue pocket T-shirt, a baseball cap, grey sweatpants and a knee brace – a Halloween costume for “not caring guy”. Then I realise, as they lead me to the kitchen, that his smart, funny assistant is Marni Turner, his long-time girlfriend. 

He’s all happy energy, passing by his office so he can turn down the volume on his beloved Pittsburgh Pirates before seating us at a small table on the front porch. He has bought us croissants and fruit salad from Huckleberry, and serves them with agave-sweetened lattes and freshly squeezed orange juice, which he feels guilty for drinking. “I’m allegedly pre-diabetic. I think I’m pre-pre-diabetic,” he says. There’s a bowl of nearly melted butter that he slathers on his croissant. He is in phenomenal shape – not just for a 73-year-old who smears butter on a croissant but for anyone. 

The house is reassuring. It’s the smallest, by far, on his block – a four-bedroom contemporary California ranch he bought before the new neighbours tore down their ranches to build mansions. There’s a pool in the back, a mix of painting and photography, some with a Native American touch, and a piano with a microphone where his son, the songwriter Sean Douglas, played with Amos Lee a few nights ago. There’s just the right amount of framed art, including a shot of Philippe Petit walking on a tightrope between the Twin Towers; the photograph was sent by director Alejandro Iñárritu to illustrate how difficult it would be to shoot 2014’s Birdman, for which Keaton received a best actor Oscar nomination. It’s a house that’s not trying too hard, one with Mrs Meyer’s soap, not Aesop, in the guest bathroom. “I come from a time where I go, ‘I don’t know if I should be having a lot of stuff’,” he says.

Every quote from Keaton in this article has been polished. While he is a great conversationalist, curious to elicit your opinions, and well-informed about politics, sports, comedy and the environment, he digresses violently to the next idea, swings back, digresses again. Talking to him is like trying to navigate a whitewater river. All the while he is a self-correcting machine, constantly interrupting himself to get toward his truth. At one point, he suggests he should get himself a T-shirt that reads “The rambling” on the front and “Always comes back” on the rear.

He’s trying to control the stream because he knows he’s supposed to be – in fact, wants to be – promoting Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the sequel to the hit 1988 Tim Burton film where Keaton, in white face paint and a green fright wig, played an unhinged demon eager to evict some yuppies from their house and marry their teenage daughter. Which doesn’t sound charming but, thanks to Keaton, somehow was. 

This sequel brings back Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara, and adds Jenna Ortega and Justin Theroux. Keaton had been avoiding making it for decades because the scripts weren’t working. “First of all, much of the first [film] had been improvised,” he says. Also, it’s hard to continue a film that was more vibe than story. “There’s one thing I don’t analyse. It’s Beetlejuice. After you’ve done it, you kind of go, wow. Especially this one. It’s actually better,” he says. “He’s a true artist, Tim. He sees the art in things where a lot of people would go ‘that’s common’ or ‘that’s weird’.” 

It was also tricky to make a sequel because Keaton’s vaudevillian trickster demon has the anti-authority, white-guy irreverence that came from the 1960s counterculture and has arguably lost its cultural relevance in the decades since. Even in 1988 the character was so intense that Keaton only appears in about 17 minutes of the original film. Keaton said he would only be in the sequel if he were similarly limited, and that it retained the hand-crafted, pre-CGI wonder of the original. Burton didn’t have to be convinced. 

Most actors, of course, want more screen time. But Keaton didn’t go into the arts to build a career. Whenever he gets famous for something – be it comedic acting or a superhero gig – he leaves it behind. And he didn’t grow up with the advantages that usually allow someone to take those risks. He comes from a rural town outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the youngest of seven. “We weren’t poor, but two of my brothers tell the story of [how] one day my dad surprised them with new boots from Sears and they were so excited they’d go out of their way to walk through puddles.” He went to Kent State University – a year after four students protesting the Vietnam War were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard – but quit after two years to make some money, moving to Pittsburgh where he did theatre and worked at the public television station. He then headed to LA and became a stand-up comic, delivering a manic, intellectual set in which he would read a Bazooka Joe comic and pretend the characters were quoting Eugene O’Neill. 

As soon as he got some acting jobs, he quit stand-up, never to return. “If there’s something you can do, there’s no sense in not trying to be great at it. Not good at it. Great at it. I knew I couldn’t be great at doing both,” he says. He does still think about returning to stand-up. Though, admittedly, he thinks about a lot of things.

The actors’ union made him change his name, since there was already a Michael Douglas (he still uses Douglas in non-professional life). He became Michael Keaton to co-star in two sitcoms, both of which were cancelled. “I was never happier. Oh my God, it felt like I got out of prison. The idea of doing something over and over for years drives me crazy.” A writer/director on one of those shows got him an audition for Night Shift, an early Ron Howard-directing job. “We had auditioned every young actor in Hollywood,” remembers his Night Shift co-star Henry Winkler. “Within 30 seconds of the audition, Ron looked at me and I looked at him, and we knew he had the role.” 

After Night Shift, he was sent a lot of silly comedy scripts. Which he loved. “One of the best compliments I ever got was from this actress who was of the theatre and a little bit snobby in that regard. She said, ‘He’s wonderfully silly.’ I thought, ‘Silly is good, man.’” 

Still, he turned down Splash. “I went, ‘Oh, I see where this could go. You’re going to have a hard time getting out of playing this guy.’ I thought, ‘It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if I have to play that all the time. But I’d rather not.’” Instead he took on a string of more emotional comedic roles, such as Mr Mom (1983) and Gung Ho (1986). Then Burton cast him as a demon in the comic-horror film Beetlejuice, which gave him the idea that he could also play… a superhero. When Burton cast him a year later as Batman, it infuriated comic-book fans, who expected a square-jawed bad-ass in the role. In the US, it was the highest-grossing film of the year by far. Audiences were in awe of the first psychologically complicated version of a superhero, one who asked the now-obvious question: what kind of desperate, insecure weirdo would wear a bat costume? 

He also turned down a $15mn offer to be in the third Batman, which he thought wasn’t well written. He knew that if he kept doing the same thing, he’d get bored, and then the audience would get bored with him. So he kept trying roles people thought he couldn’t do, such as the drama Pacific Heights. “I don’t know where that comes from. You could drill into my head. You could draw blood. Run tests on my DNA. We could talk about when I was seven. But I always bet on myself. I’m human, so I worry. But I never succumbed to desperation. You’re as screwed as screwed gets if you succumb to desperation.”

For two decades, Keaton wasn’t an A-lister. In fact, when I met Sean Douglas at a dinner party and he mentioned the fact that his father was “an actor”, he told me I was too young to have heard of him. “I’m going to kick Sean’s ass,” Keaton says. In Sean’s defence, Keaton has made no effort at being famous. He doesn’t go to Hollywood events or parties. When I saw him a decade ago in the bar of a tapas restaurant in Pasadena wearing shorts, my wife and I gasped, as if we’d spotted a crested ibis. He exists only in the wild.

Fans celebrated his “comeback” when Birdman came out in 2014. Before Birdman, he had turned down a lot of projects that seemed familiar, done some films that didn’t hit big, and spent a lot of time fly-fishing at his Montana ranch. “At the same time, not everybody was knocking on my door,” he says. But even though he knew it would be good for his career, he couldn’t go along with the comeback storyline in interviews. Because Keaton doesn’t really clock where he is in Hollywood. It doesn’t matter anyway, because as soon as he gets to the top, he jumps to another building.

Since then, he’s been in a string of extraordinary dramas. He played the Boston Globe editor who investigated the Catholic Church’s child sex abuses in Spotlight. Then McDonald’s Ray Kroc in The Founder; Kenneth Feinberg, who dispersed money to victims of 9/11 in Worth; an opioids-addicted doctor in the Hulu miniseries Dopesick, for which he won an Emmy. He made it after his sister lost her son to fentanyl. “I’m fortunate enough to do what I do to begin with. But if you can occasionally do something that might mean something to somebody – not everybody gets a chance to do that. You gotta do those.” 

In addition to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, he’s also starring in this year’s Goodrich, an indie dramedy about a dad with a young second family and an older daughter, played by Mila Kunis. It’s directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer, who wrote Goodrich with him in mind. “Someone told me that the sign of a great actor is that they could play either part in The Odd Couple,” says Meyers-Shyer. “He’d be great at both.” Kunis, who had never met Keaton before, was able to decode his rambling immediately: “He has lots of thoughts at the same time and tries to figure out how to string them together. He wants to play around.” But what most surprised her was how happy he always was. “You know how stand-ups always have a little darkness? I never got that from him.”

Keaton tries to spend June until November in Montana, where he currently lives in a cabin while he renovates his house. He’s such a part of the community there that, decades ago, the local firefighters put an old metal hat in his house after he pulled over to help them with a fire. He’s mostly up there to fly-fish, which he does with buddies Huey Lewis, Tom Brokaw, Thomas McGuane and Carl Hiaasen. He got interested in fly-fishing as a kid after seeing a photograph of his grandfather wading with a reel. “For a long time, people would laugh at me about it, because they said, ‘You?’” he says. It is indeed hard to picture him standing still for hours on end, or even an hour on end. “But that’s why it makes 100 per cent sense. It used to be you could be alone forever, man. Now there’s so many people. The movie turned everything,” he says. (“The movie” is what people in Montana call A River Runs Through It.) 

Hiaasen remembers Keaton taking him to a spot he had access to with great trout-fishing water. He dropped him off at a bank, drove a bit up-river to another spot, and agreed to meet for lunch. When Hiaasen went to find Keaton after a couple of hours, the actor had vanished, moving on to the next activity. Hiaasen didn’t hear from him for two months. “I called some friends and said, ‘Have you seen Keaton? If something happened to him, this is going to be a bad headline for me.’” Hiaasen says that Keaton is hyper-focused in a way that makes him a little distractible. “As much as I love him, I’m glad I’m not in on the meetings. An hour-long meeting? To keep track of his thoughts? It’s one thing when you’re going down a river. It’s another thing if you’re trying to close a $20mn deal.”

While he doesn’t collect fishing gear (because, you know, it’s stuff), Keaton does love it so much that he once wrote an essay about wildlife corridors for the Filson catalogue. And he does own a couple of vintage rods, including a Leonard cane rod that hangs in his home office. “It’s gone crazy, the prices. Just to find old Bogdan reels, that’s gone nuts,” he says. For a while he got obsessed with a far more expensive hobby: cutting, which is a Western style of horse riding done in competitions. “The money was just going out. And you can’t win any money. You win a saddle, or you win $200. And you have to go live in some little lousy motel for two days. But I don’t want to talk about it any more, because I’m going to want to do it again.” 

Instead of cutting, Keaton hunts birds. “That’s the only other sport where an animal is your teammate,” he says. “This thing, it’s called quartering, where they quarter across the field – boom, boom, boom – like clockwork. It’s just the most beautiful.” Though Keaton makes a pheasant-breast appetiser (quick‑fried strips with a dipping sauce), he doesn’t love shooting. “I shot a deer when I was a kid. Didn’t love it. Though I love the whole completion thing. Like, what’s the goal? Clean the bird. Cook the bird. Eat the bird. I love the whole cycle.” 

Heading back to my car, I feel more than satisfied. I think it’s because, perhaps more than anyone I’ve met, Keaton was constantly present. Which is the first thing they teach in acting class. Either he really mastered that or, more likely, he never needed to learn.