Michael Keaton has been called many things throughout his nearly fifty-year film career. Answering to the names of Batman, Beetlejuice (if said three times), Johnny Dangerously, and Adrian Toomes (aka Vulture), he has been a man of many faces. It’s easy to forget one’s self when wearing so many faces, and even more so when a few of them become memorable for generations of audiences. It appears that the 73-year-old actor has been playing the alias game since day one, leaving his real name to be buried beneath decades of fame. With the release of a new movie, he’s looking to finally change that.
In a interview with People, the Mr. Mom star stated that he wishes to be called something closer to his real name, Michael John Douglas. When he joined SAG back in the mid-seventies, there was already someone in the union with the name Michael Douglas, and this actor would also go on to become a huge star (you may have heard of him!) This drove the newcomer, Keaton, to the phone book to find a new moniker.
“I was looking through — I can’t remember if it was a phone book,” Keaton said in the interview. “I must’ve gone, ‘I don’t know, let me think of something here.’ And I went, ‘Oh, that sounds reasonable.’”
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Reasonable or not, the name was catchy enough to stick, and he would have a double whammy of breakout title-character performances with director Tim Burton in the hilarious dark fantasy Beetlejuice in 1988, and then his murderous take on Batman in 1989. Since then, his career has seen peaks and valleys. Some of the movies were good, and some not so good, but one can always depend on Michael Keaton to “get nuts” for every single performance.
With a big career resurgence in the past decade, he seems to be tying a loose end that has been there since the beginning, and even meant to do so for while at the director’s helm for the neo-noir Knox Goes Away (2023), but apparently couldn’t unglue himself from the director’s chair in time to make the change in the film’s credits.
“I said,” he says, in People, ‘Hey, just as a warning, my credit is going to be Michael Keaton Douglas.’ And it totally got away from me. And I forgot to give them enough time to put it in and create that. But that will happen.”
What happens next is that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will more-than-likely be the final film to have the name Micheal Keaton in the credits, but people will most likely continue to call him that until the day he makes that final trip into the nether realm. It should be enough that his stage name will be celebrated long after he’s gone, but just like Michael Douglas once said in one of his movies: “The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is now playing in theaters.