Michael Keaton recently reflected on a funny interaction between him and Jack Nicholson while the former was training for his role in 1989’s Batman.
Speaking to GQ in a video breaking down his signature roles, Keaton joked about a time when Nicholson spotted him training in the gym to bulk up for the role, something Nicholson didn’t understand.
“I was training to be really fit,” Keaton said. “One day, Jack Nicholson walked by me. We were just starting to shoot and I was working on this bag, and I had been training to get fit. He walked by me, and he goes, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘You know, just working out.’ He goes, ‘What are you doing that for?’ I didn’t have an answer for him. He just walked off and went to this other trailer.”
Keaton says he should have actually been trying to get smaller
Keaton continued by joking that his real mistake in the film was trying to be as big as possible when he should have been aiming for the exact opposite.
“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, there’s room inside. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I was like, ‘I’m an actor, I’m going to do all this stuff.’ I mean, it helped in terms of carrying the whole thing around all the time.”
In 2023, Keaton reprised Batman for the DCEU installment The Flash, where Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) disrupts time and encounters the alternate Bruce Wayne. Warner Bros. initially planned more appearances for Keaton’s Batman, including a supporting role in Batgirl and a cameo in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Unfortunately, Batgirl’s release was canceled, The Flash underperformed at the box office, and Keaton’s Aquaman cameo was removed from the final cut.
