The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
What it takes to be a leading man aged
Steak just Six times a year Hardly any wine The odd poSh face cream A lot of running
Michael Keaton is not an easy interviewee. He says he likes to listen to other actors talk about their careers, but is uncomfortable talking about his own. ‘I get bored to shit listening to my own voice,’ he explains. It’s not so much because he’s private – although he is – but because he doesn’t want people to think he’s self-regarding, or as he puts it, ‘all cool and groovy’. Keaton was brought up, the youngest of seven children, in a st r ict Cat holic fa mily in r ural Pennsylvania, where it was considered ‘vulgar to boast, to brag’. So now, when he hears himself talk about his life as a Hollywood star, ‘it sounds so highfalutin I kind of want to vomit’.
Since the 1980s Keaton has shifted between genres in unexpected ways: playing a recovering addict in Clean and Sober (1988); Dogberry in Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation of Much
Ado About Nothing (1993); and a father who is able to duplicate himself in the comedy
Multiplicity (1996). He’s worked with major directors – Ron Howard (on Night Shift, Gung Ho and The Paper), Quentin Tarantino (on
Jackie Brown), Tim Burton (on Beetlejuice and Batman). And his portrayal of the winged crusader is widely regarded as cinema’s best yet – ahead of George Clooney, Christian Bale and Val Kilmer – despite him being shorter than all of them (he is 5ft 9in) and 40 years old when he was making Batman Returns (1992).
But then he appeared in some films that weren’t much good. Herbie Fully Loaded, in which the central character is a VW Beetle, is, in the words of a reviewer, ‘formulaic from end to end’. A RoboCop remake flopped (although it did quite well globally). And Need For Speed, based on a series of video games, was described by one critic as ‘perfunctory tosh’.
Michael Keaton seemed to be in retreat. Until, out of the blue, the director Alejandro Iñárritu cast him in Birdman, a brilliantly surreal film about a washed-up superhero actor trying to make a comeback. Keaton’s performance won him his first Golden Globe award and his first Oscar nomination in 2015. He immediately followed it up with a lead role in the Oscarwinning Spotlight, which tells the true story of how the The Boston Globe uncovered widespread child abuse by Catholic clergymen.
Now, at 65, Hollywood can’t get enough of him. This month we shall see him in The Founder, about the genesis of the McDonald’s empire. He plays Ray Kroc, a salesman who cheated the brothers McDonald, the original owners of the fast-food company. He will then appear, on equally villainous form, as Spider-Man’s nemesis The Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
So what does Keaton make of his resurgence? ‘I’m doing the same things I’ve always done,’ he responds, simply.
We meet in a hotel near Covent Garden, London. Keaton, who looks glossy in a white shir t, jeans and a houndstooth jacket, grins his welcome and immediately starts telling me about The Founder. He says he decided to do it because of the character of Ray Kroc. Set in 1950s America, the film introduces us to Kroc as a 52-year-old milkshake-machine salesman; by the end he is a magnate with a house the size of Maine. And let’s just say, he doesn’t get there by being nice.
‘He did a deal with the devil that was almost sadistic – and as an actor and someone who is curious about life, that’s really f un to play,’ Keaton says.
Keaton’s resea rch for t he role included watching a documentary about Kroc. ‘Within the first seven minutes I thought, “I’ve got it, I know what to do.” Ray had a rhy thm to his voice, a pattern’ – he clicks his fingers – ‘an aggressiveness.’
Though he is courteous throughout the interview, Keaton would clearly rather be elsewhere, and has no qualms about saying so: ‘All of this, what we are doing, is uncomfortable to me.’ His natural habitat is the wild outdoors, and at his ranch in Montana he has seven horses and four dogs – two Labradors and two English setters. He likes fishing and hunting (birds only), cares about the environment (he has campaigned to preserve migrating-elk routes), and admires the Comanche Indians because they were
‘badasses. Hard. And they could ride. Oh man, they understood horses like no one else.’ He is in London filming the thriller American
Assassin, but admits that the thought of remote Scotland had him chomping at the bit, so he escaped for a few days – and feels better for it. ‘If I don’t get a bit of that every so often, I start to go, “Oof, this is weighing on me,”’ he says.
Keaton speaks in a series of monologues – words come tumbling out – ‘like a lot of water going over a cliff’, according to one journalist. And he’s an actor who is interested in the outside world, particularly politics. A Democrat who supported Bernie Sanders, he uses his Twitter feed (he has 339,000 followers) to share Trump-bashing articles.
It is a great surprise to see the way his looks have changed over the years. YouTube clips of him doing stand-up comedy in 1980, in his late 20s, show Keaton with a rubbery face and a mullet of flyaway dark hair. In later life he has suddenly become handsome: slim, closecropped silver hair, elegant features. (Tim Burton says the key to Keaton’s Batman was his eyes. ‘Those crazy blue eyes, peering out of that rubber cocoon [mask]. It’s a terrible thing to do to a good actor. Michael handled it with his eyes.’)
Is he vain? ‘I am probably vain enough that I don’t want to look too bad,’ he admits. He says he watches his weight, meditates, goes running, drinks power shakes, limits himself to six or seven steaks a year and occasionally buys ‘some bullshit cream that claims it’s going to do something good for my face’. But his approach is mostly practical. ‘I look at myself as a business, so when I look in the mirror I go, “How’s your business doing? Am I running it OK? How many more movies can I do where I can get a role that can potentially make X amount of dollars, so I can put that in the bank and not have to think about taking shitty roles?”’
Keaton views his profession with a coldly realistic eye. ‘It’s all about economics,’ he says. ‘If you are a part of something that makes a lot of money, or gets a lot of attention, you become more appealing. If it tanks, you lose value. People don’t do it because they love you. I’m OK with that.’
He lives comfortably and has no particular need to work. So why does he do it? ‘Just when I think I’m kind of done, I find a new thing, a way of doing something, one line or two lines; it just keeps you curious enough to do it one more time. I saw Pat rick Stewar t and Ian McKellen [in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land on the West End] the other night, and I thought, “Man, at that age they can find stuff that’s so intricate, and the rhythms and the minutiae – how do you do that?” And I thought, “How many years will it take for me to do what Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen just did? Do I really like it enough? I’ve got a lot of other shit to do, man. I’ve got horses to take care of, I’ve got people to hang out with.”’
His childhood, near Pittsburgh, was ‘tough’, Keaton says. Although he’s from a big family (originally nine children, two of whom died in infancy), being 20 years younger than his eldest sibling meant ‘I watched everyone move on’. His father was a civil engineer and his mother went to mass every morning. He remembers the family living in a run-down old farmhouse when he was four, a place that looked like a ‘dump’ with no inside toilet. ‘I’d stay out till 8.30, nine at night. Just blow in. My mum and dad never really cared much. It was OK. We were pretty free to roam.’
As a small boy, he was shy and sensitive. He says he still takes things ‘way too deeply, and way too hard… Then you try to act like you’re not and you end up living most of your life trying to be something you’re not; then you have to stop and rework all that. It’s exhausting.’
He went to a Catholic school: ‘It was tough, getting whacked on the knuckles. I was desperately afraid to go to school because I was tiny and scared of getting my ass kicked, so I picked fights. I did everything to prove I wasn’t scared. It kind of made me not afraid of a lot of things. It teaches you to be resilient.’
Apivotal moment happened when he was seven or eight. ‘I was goofing around at school and one of t he nuns said, “I want you to sing to everyone.” I remember standing t here and my face turning beetroot-re d. A nd t hen I st a r te d bel low i ng off-key and everyone laughed. And I thought,
‘I look at myself as a business, so when I look in the mirror I go, “How’s your business doing? Am I running it OK?”’
‘I said to Tarantino, “You can find 10 guys who can do this better than I can do it,” and then he got me drunk’
“Oh, OK, I can stand up in front of people.”’
After studying speech and journalism for two years at Kent State University, Ohio, Keaton dropped out and moved to Pittsburgh, where he got a job backstage on a children’s television show. Like Kevin Spacey and Jim Carrey, he started his performing career as a comedian – ‘I always loved funny; writing funny, being with funny’ – and in the mid-1970s he moved to New York and then Los Angeles, making a patchy living taking any stand-up gigs he could get. After a brief stint on the TV sitcom Working
Stiffs, he caught the attention of Lowell Ganz, who co-wrote Night Shift – a film about two young men caught operating a prostitution r ing, using a cit y morg ue as t heir headquarters. Ganz recommended Keaton for the role of one of the morgue attendants to the film’s director, Ron Howard. Its ostensible star, Henry Winkler (from Happy Days), played the
other. And yet the influential film critic Pauline Kael said at the time that it was Keaton who stole t he show: ‘If it weren’t for Michael Keaton… the film would seem negligible.’
Keaton is known for being particular about his roles. He turned down a third Batman film – Batman Forever – because the script ‘sucked’. And he initially turned down Tim Burton for the black comedy Beetlejuice, in which he plays a decomposing ghost hired to help haunt a house; and Quentin Tarantino for the part of a law-enforcement agent in the crime thriller Jackie Brown.
‘Sometimes I’m lazy,’ he says. ‘I just go, “Ah, I don’t know. I’m breeding one of my dogs, or I didn’t take a vacation – I should go.” Sometimes it’s that. Mostly it’s just that I don’t know how to do it.’ He goes on. ‘Tim couldn’t really express what Beetlejuice was. It wasn’t so much, “No, I ref use”; it was, “I really like this g uy, but I don’t know what he’s talking about.”’
What makes Keaton interesting as an actor is that when he’s not doing it for the money – ‘I’ve taken movies for the money in order not to have to take movies for money’ – he has to work up a desire to play a part; find a meaning to sustain his interest. As Burton has said, ‘When it came to Batman, I’d been meeting with these beefy action-hero types, then Michael arrives… He comes in with this whole psychology, approaching it with an almost manic-depressive quality in mind. I thought: now I get it.’ Keaton recalls t hat in t he case of Jackie
Brown and Tarantino, ‘I said, “You can find 10 guys who can do this better than I can do it,” and then he got me drunk.’
Keaton barely drinks now. ‘I can’t take it,’ he says. ‘All of a sudden you get up from the table and you’ve had two glasses of wine, and you go, “I’ve got to go and lie down. When did this happen?”’ He has a ‘boozing gene’ in his family; his maternal grandfather was an alcoholic. But he says he’s too conscientious to be an addict. He has an inner voice saying, ‘Hey man, you probably shouldn’t have that extra glass of wine, you have to go to work in the morning.’ Still, tobacco was hard to quit. ‘Chewed it for years. I miss it right now.’
When I ask about his love life, he simply smiles and shakes his head. Past girlfriends include Courteney Cox, Michelle Pfeiffer and Padma Lakshmi, and he has a son, Sean, 33, an award-winning song writer, with the actress Caroline McWilliams. They divorced in 1990 after eight years of marriage, and McWilliams passed away in 2010.
As for future plans, they include sleep (‘A sixmonth nap’) and building another house. ‘I’m moving my horses from one place to another – not in Montana, another place.’ Keaton sits back and smiles. ‘I really like pushing dirt around.’ The Founder is out on February 17