Michael Keaton assisted kick with offing the trend of movies dependent on comic books when he played the title role in the 1989 fever dream Batman, yet he concedes that he doesn’t thoroughly get the marvel.
“After the first Batman, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an entire [comic book] movie,” Keaton told the Hollywood Reporter in an interview published Wednesday. “I just never got around to it. So you’re talking to a guy who wasn’t in the zeitgeist of that whole world.”
He gives all the credit for the smashing accomplishment of the genre to Batman’s director, Tim Burton. With respect to his own performance in both that film and its Burton-directed sequel, 1992’s Batman Returns, Keaton assumed he might have improved, and he said he’s grateful that he has one more shot at the job in the next year’s highly anticipated The Flash.
“Frankly, in the back of my head, I always thought, ‘I bet I could go back and nail that motherf***er,'” Keaton said. “And so I thought, ‘Well, now that they’re asking me, let me see if I can pull that off.”
The Oscar-nominated actor clarified that it took him for a spell to appreciate that the flick happens in equal universes, so the two his and Ben Affleck’s versions of the Dark Knight will exist. However, something different truly clicked.
“What’s really interesting is how much more I got [Batman] when I went back and did him. I get this on a whole other level now. I totally respect it. I respect what people are trying to make,” Keaton said. “I never looked at it like, ‘Oh, this is just a silly thing.’ It was not a silly thing when I did Batman. But it has become a giant thing, culturally. It’s iconic. So I have even more respect for it because what do I know? This is a big deal in the world to people. You’ve got to honor that and be respectful of that. Even I go, ‘Jesus, this is huge.'”
Keaton — who likewise has the dramatic miniseries Dopesick, the thriller The Protege and Marvel’s Morbius, wherein he plays the disgusting Vulture from the Spider-Man series, lined up during the current year — additionally talked about politics. While Keaton has campaigned for the benefit of Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden when every one of them was running for president, he’s reluctant to get included. Yet, it isn’t so he’s uninterested.
“I learned a long time ago, you do more damage because you’re famous,” Keaton said. “I’ve told people, you don’t want me there. They’ll go, ‘Well of course he brought his Hollywood friend.’ You know what people forget? We all were just some person somewhere in Cincinnati or fing Ottawa or fing Cleveland.”
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