You wanna get nuts? Then tell Michael Keaton he had a comeback in 2014. Keaton may not have been the premiere player he used to be before being cast in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman but he was far from being past due. After all, he was a part of the Toy Story franchise and was getting consistent work elsewhere. So when people say Birdman was his comeback role, he thinks you can buzz off.
As Michael Keaton told GQ, Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (full title) was always being positioned as some sort of return to glory for the actor. “A really, really, really smart guy, a guy I liked a lot, said, ‘Comeback—that’s the story.’ I went, ‘Honestly, it’s kind of bullsh*t.’” He added that while he could have played along it would have come across as phony. “I thought I could make that story up, but I knew I’m going to be bullsh*tting every time I talk about it. By the way, I know business. I like business. Doesn’t bother me. You go, ‘This is a business, man.’”
For the most part, Michael Keaton has had at least one movie out each year since he truly broke out with 1982’s Night Shift. After Beetlejuice and pair of Batman movies, the guy was on top of Hollywood. But as with pretty much everybody in the business, that wouldn’t always hold. But Keaton kept his composure even amid cool streaks, saying, “I never panic. If you get desperate, you’re f*cked. Don’t ever get desperate. You can get insecure and nervous, and go, ‘Wow, boy, I’m not doing so great right now.’ But when you get desperate, you’re dead.”
But let’s face it, it’s still easy to say that Birdman was in fact a comeback role for Michael Keaton, whose mirroring career to his character was not lost on the audience. For his turn as an actor known for playing a superhero who had faded from the public eye (see?), Keaton finally earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Although he lost to Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything — showing just how easily the Academy is prone to vote for the biopic performance — Birdman gave Michael Keaton that second push that found him joining the Spider-Man universe, Best Picture winner Spotlight and more. And now, Keaton Keaton is going back to one of his classics yet again, with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice set for release next month.
Do you think Birdman was a true “comeback” for Michael Keaton or is that not fair?