“That’s not true”: the two iconic roles Michael Keaton didn’t turn down, and the one he definitely did
“A heathen from Eton, on a bag of Michael Keaton” goes the song ‘Never Fight a Man With a Perm’ by Idles, and although it’s tough to imagine the Hollywood star as a rowdy former public schoolboy on a class A-fuelled rampage, that’s one of the few roles he hasn’t taken on over a 40-year spell making movies.
After all, this is the man behind several masks, not just everyone’s favourite formerly-alive shape-shifter Beetlejuice but also the original Batman too, the 1989 movie one, of course not the 1960s Adam West version prancing about in spandex while KAPOW-ing hapless henchmen.
And while Keaton is rightly famous for those characters in addition to performances in a host of other acclaimed movies like Spotlight and The Founder, he’s also one of those mainstream actors who is well known for having turned down plenty of opportunities that turned out to be great ones for the stars that did end up taking them.
Some examples of movies that Keaton said ‘No, I’m alright, cheers!’ to are Bill Murray’s lead role in Groundhog Day, something he said he later regretted, Jeff Goldblum’s part in David Cronenberg’s sci-fi horror The Fly, and even the lead in Philadelphia, which eventually went to Tom Hanks.
He was grilled over some of these missed chances by Grantland a few years back and shed some light on whether he actually passed on them, pouring cold water on the rumour that he said no to Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, saying, “No, that’s not true. Absolutely not. I would’ve jumped all over that”.
As for refusing to sign on as one of the four besuited spectre-vanishers in 1984’s classic comedy Ghostbusters, Keaton said, “Not true”, and confirmed he was never offered a part. One movie he did admit to turning down, however, was the Daryl Hannah mermaid romp Splash from the same year, adding, “I really can’t remember now whether it was Tom [Hanks] or John [Candy]’s role. I just remember at the time thinking I wanted to get away from what I’d just done on [1982 Ron Howard comedy] Night Shift. I thought if I do it again, I might get myself stuck… So I said no [to Splash] so I could set up this framework right away, where I could do different things.”
Those different things proved to be a succession of movies that were exactly what Keaton was worried about, feel-good comedies like Mr Mom, Touch and Go and The Squeeze, the last of which was a massive box office flop.
But that all changed for the actor when Tim Burton came calling and put him in the Batman mask for the first time, the film co-starring Jack Nicholson and Kim Basinger that proved to be a colossal hit across the globe, bringing in $411million at the box office and leading to a sequel, Batman Returns, in 1992.
Keaton is still working with Burton, of course, most recently reprising his role as Beetlejuice in a long-awaited second movie, and he donned the Batsuit for a third time for Batgirl, a spin-off movie that was filmed between 2021 and 2022 but was later scrapped due to cost-cutting measures.
