The 2012 role Michelle Pfeiffer waited over 40 years to play: “I just wanted to be in the movie”
Michelle Pfeiffer’s weirdest film fulfilled her childhood dream.
Tim Burton is a director with such a specific, eccentric style of filmmaking that he becomes the star of whatever project he works on, regardless of any A-list actors that are attached. The requirement of someone in Burton’s ensemble is to adhere to his vision, as there are only a few performances that transcend that stipulation.
One of the few actors to do it is Michelle Pfeiffer, whose performance as Selina Kyle in Batman Returns was both a perfect interpretation of the comics and a great adaptation of Burton’s material. She set such a precedent with one of DC Comics’ greatest characters that every subsequent actor cast as Catwoman has had to live up to her legacy.
Despite the praise that Pfeiffer got for her performance, she surprisingly didn’t work with Burton again for several decades. While Burton had many interesting projects, Pfeiffer grew excited when she heard that he would be directing a new version of Dark Shadows.
“I had this memory of loving the TV show,” Pfeiffer said. “I’d sprint home from school so I didn’t miss one second of it. I just wanted to be in the movie, work with Tim Burton again, and work with Johnny Depp.”
While she considered the project to be a pipe dream, Pfeiffer went out of her way to indicate to Burton that she was interested.
”One day I called Tim and said, ‘Look, I don’t know if there’s anything for me, but I’d love to do it,’” Pfeiffer said. “A year went by, maybe more, and I thought, ‘It’s never going to happen,’ but it did. I had so much fun making it!”
Dark Shadows reimagined the classic supernatural sitcom with Pfeiffer and Depp in the roles of Barnabas Collins and Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, respectively. They weren’t the only alumni of Burton’s previous work that made an appearance in the film; other former collaborators that were part of the Dark Shadows ensemble included Christopher Lee and Helena Bonham Carter, alongside fresher faces like Chloe Grace Moretz, Jonny Lee Miller, and Eva Green, who would reunite with Burton on Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and Dumbo.
Although there had been critical scepticism for nearly all of Burton’s films released in the 21st century, Dark Shadows was his first release in a while that outright bombed; the marketing campaign hadn’t made it clear who the intended audience was, and it didn’t help that the Halloween-themed film was released in the middle of May, and only one week after the record-breaking opening weekend of The Avengers. While Pfeiffer’s performance didn’t catch too much criticism, it began to feel like Depp had been using Burton as a crutch, as he was starting to rely on familiar schtick with each role.
Dark Shadows marked another step forward in Burton’s decline, as his films in the next decade began to underperform both critically and financially; the one exception was Frankenweenie, released the same year, which earned Burton his second-ever Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Animated Feature’. While Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was the rare win that felt like Burton had more to offer than just empathy nostalgia, it’s unclear if the 67-year-old filmmaker has it in himself to make another masterpiece on the level of Batman Returns ever again.
