The timeless comedy Michael Keaton refused to star in: “I didn’t get it”
Recently, we discovered that Michael Keaton very nearly starred in the JJ Abrams series Lost, only passing up on playing the character of Dr Jack Shepard on the twisty show because he was originally going to be killed off after just one episode of the first series.
But it’s definitely not the only project Keaton has said no to, as we’ll find out, some of which would have led to classics that we know and love seeming very different indeed. In the 1980s and ‘90s, thanks to his performances in hit films like Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and Batman reboot, he was hot property to say the least, but even before that, he was offered parts in movies that would go on to break box office records.
They include 1984’s Ghostbusters, with Keaton being offered a part as either Peter Venkman or Egon Spengler, and the Tom Hanks comedy Splash, with Daryl Hannah. Keaton’s profligacy continued into the ’90s too, which found him saying no to another Hanks vehicle in Philadelphia, which would go on to win Oscars, and a $15million payday to slip into the batsuit for a third time in 1995’s Batman Forever.
One absolutely plum role he shook his head at was, like Ghostbusters, eventually played to perfection by Bill Murray, and that’s the 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, one of the finest comedies in recent memory and a huge box office hit. The lead role of Phil Connors could have gone to a number of actors, including Tom Hanks, Chevy Chase and Keaton, before it went to Murray, and the man has regretted it ever since.
On choosing not to do the film, Keaton told Entertainment Weekly, “I didn’t get it. I thought, This guy sounds like the kind of wry, sardonic, glib young man I’ve played, and it ended up being so great. But you can’t do that better than Bill Murray did it.”
He may well have regretted the decision even more because his star certainly dimmed in the 20 years or so following the film’s release, and while he continued to work on movies, some of which were reasonably successful, he was some way short of his heyday as one of the most in-demand leading men in Hollywood.
Then, a stand-out role in the Will Ferrell comedy The Other Guys in 2010 reminded casting directors of his talent, and since then, he has had even more critical success than in the early years, with much of that down to 2014’s Birdman, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, in which he played a once-famous actor trying to reignite his career by staging a play on Broadway.
Keaton picked up an Academy Award nomination for his performance as well as won the Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor’, and just a year later, he also received considerable acclaim for his work on Spotlight, winning a Sag award, and again for playing businessman Ray Kroc in the McDonald’s origin story The Founder in 2016. After winning another Golden Globe for the TV series Dopesick in 2022, he has gone back to some of the major franchises that made him famous 30 years ago, making a sequel to Beetlejuice and reprising his role as Batman in The Flash.
He would also have been seen as the ‘Caped Crusader’ in Batgirl, starring Leslie Grace and Brendan Fraser, and completed filming, but the entire $90m project was scrapped after disastrous test screenings. Regardless, Keaton will be keeping busy with a psychological thriller called The Whisper Man alongside Robert De Niro and Severance’s Adam Scott.
