Michael Keaton received solid advice from Jack Nicholson while the two were in the midst of filming the first Batman movie. Unbeknownst to the actors, the film would go on to become a box office sensation and cement the Dark Knight as a box office staple for decades to come. One could even go so far as to argue that there wouldn’t be a Marvel Cinematic Universe if Tim Burton‘s weirdly gothic film hadn’t been a smash hit. It was that huge.
Like any actor who’s tackled a superhero role, Keaton was concerned with getting in shape. Fortunately, a wise and snarky Nicholson schooled Keaton on the virtues of working smarter not harder, which the Beetlejuice actor recently shared in a new video interview with GQ.
Via IndieWire:
“One day Jack Nicholson walked by me and goes, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m working out.’ And he said, ‘What are you doing that for?’ I didn’t have an answer for him, he just walked off,” he said. “I approached it totally wrong. It’s better to be really small and little and thin inside the thing. You can move, you can breathe inside. I don’t know what I was thinking, I just thought ‘I’m an actor, I’m gonna do all this stuff!’”
While Keaton threw himself into the role of Batman/Bruce Wayne, he did admit to having doubts about the movie. He also had no idea why the heck everyone even cared about his casting.
“When they said, ‘We’re thinking of doing Batman,’ I said, ‘Wait, you’re thinking of making a movie about Batman?” Keaton revealed. “The fact that Tim said ‘That guy, I want that guy’… the fact that people cared one way or another so much is still baffling. But that was a ballsy move on his part.”
You can watch the full GQ interview with Keaton below or just watch the Batman stuff, which starts right out of the gate:
(Via IndieWire)