Michael Keaton’s conflicted interest in the Batman movies
Actor Michael Keaton might be best known to certain generations for playing the caped crusader Batman in the late 1980s and early 1990s, famously starring in Batman and Batman Returns, both directed by Tim Burton, who had previously cast Keaton in Beetlejuice. The movies would become some of the most memorable Batman efforts until the mid-2000s when Christopher Nolan’s Dark Night trilogy arrived.
Back when Keaton was promoting the film Birdman, he once suggested that he had no interest in any of the Batman films, certainly not those directed by Christopher Nolan nor those starring Ben Affleck in the role that Keaton had once famously played. There is certainly an air of bitterness to the proceeding words.
The actor told Entertainment Weekly: “Chris 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 are asking me, ‘Is Ben Affleck going to be any good?’ And my attitude is, ‘First of all, why would you ask me?'”
Keaton continued: “Second, he’s probably going to 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 really know what to do with you. It was hard then; it ain’t that hard now.”
Of course, now Keaton has once again reprised his Batman role in the recent film The Flash. So there’s certainly a sense of the actor not caring one jot about Batman unless he himself is playing the character. Keaton can’t seem to find it within himself to give the due praise that Ben Affleck and certainly Christian Bale deserve for playing the famous hero.
Rather, Keaton is keen to stress that playing Batman is now far easier than it ever was. But just tell that to Bale, who went to excruciating physical lengths to make sure he was in peak shape to defend Gotham City over three separate movies. And that was wedged in the middle of a number of films that saw Bale change his body shape dramatically for different roles.
We can certainly assume that Keaton is perhaps a touch bitter over the fact that Bale and Nolan have drawn widespread acclaim for their Dark Knight films, while his own Batman movies have seemingly faded into obscurity, save for those that are old enough to remember them fondly.
