Interview: Michael Keaton, actor

The actor formerly known as Batman is sporting trainers, a track suit and (indoors on a gloomy autumn afternoon) shades – "Just in case I want to lie to you," jokes Michael Keaton, before obligingly removing them. Compact and trim, slightly shorter than I'd expected (surely five foot ten at most), he has never boasted conventionally chiselled leading-man looks.

But, at 58, his unusual, mobile face, those extraordinary vaulting eyebrows and sensuous, fleshy mouth are as remarkable as ever. He was right to want to hide his eyes: they are uncommonly expressive – "a wild pair", in the words of the director Tim Burton, with whom Keaton has made three movies, including two tales of the Caped Crusader. Clearly he still has a fondness for masks.

Lately, things have been a little quiet for Keaton, and it's a sore point. "Look at the movies that are made," he rails. "Just look what's made. And then look at what's not made. I almost never watch movies at hotels, but last night I had seen all the news, like, five times over and I thought, 'Well I'll watch a movie.' But, flipping through the channels, I went nah, nah, nah …"

Pick up the newspaper and look at what films are screening, he insists, on a roll. "They're animated so there's no room for an actor. Or they're the kind of movie where there's only one or two guys they'll cast – The Rock, let's say. Then we're down to the women's movies and you go, 'What is there for me to do in it?' And finally there are the little independent movies and so all the actors flock to them and there's only so many to go around."

It's not as if there haven't been interesting roles: Keaton has twice played Ray Nicolette, the agent created by Elmore Leonard in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (1997) and, the following year, in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight. But the work dried up and in 2005 he was pounding the publicity circuit to enthuse about a supporting role in Herbie Fully Loaded opposite Lindsay Lohan and an anthropomorphic car.

Keaton developed a sideline doing voiceovers, for animated films such as Cars and the marvellous English-language version of Hiyao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso (The Red Pig), in which his gravelly tones brought Miyazaki's hard-bitten, yet hopelessly romantic daredevil pilot, vividly to life. The actor goes a little defensive when the voiceover work is mentioned, though he has two more such jobs coming up: Noah's Ark (Keaton plays Noah) and Toy Story 3, in which he's Barbie's main squeeze, Ken. In a trailer for that film, Ken gets offended when it's suggested that his girlfriend is more famous than he is.

Maybe it's time for Keaton to get more pro-active about creating projects for himself? "Yeah. I think about that a lot," he says, with an uncertain laugh. "I go, 'Don't just sit around. You're not getting any younger. You'll be dead in a few years'. So you're right. Whatever."

Now, in The Merry Gentleman – the story of an unlikely bond between Keaton's enigmatic hired assassin and a shy young woman fleeing an abusive marriage – he has finally found a flesh-and-blood role that's worthy of him. Set in a luminous, wintry Chicago, it's hard to pin down: part murder thriller, part (but only a very small part) romance and principally a delicate mood piece, shot through with shafts of very dark humour, about the yawning chasms between people. This is not a film to bust blocks, of course, or to restore at a stroke Keaton's bankability, but it has been admired by American critics.

Not only does Keaton give a finely judged performance; he also directs, taking over at short notice when the original writer-director, Ron Lazzeretti, fell ill. It is his first time behind the camera. "I guess I didn't know if I was ready," he says. "But you've got to prove yourself sometime, and I kind of knew what this movie was trying to do. The danger is that you're not good enough to yourself. There's this expression: the shoemaker's daughter always has the worst shoes. You've got to be careful of that. You've got to go, 'Wait, I'm on this screen. I'm a key player here'."

It is a good role, his best in some time. But Keaton allows his co-star, Kelly Macdonald, to walk away serenely with the movie (the Glaswegian actress was attached to the film when he came on board and he made it a condition that she remain). He even let her keep her accent, and works an approving joke about it into the script. "They tried to make it my movie. But it was her movie from the get-go. And I love that accent; it was never an issue. In fact we were trying to build the story around it."

The Merry Gentleman is laden with silences. Keaton's interview schedule, on the other hand, is running over an hour late, chiefly because of his reluctance to stop for breath in between perorations. Although he has just arrived in Britain, jet-lagged from Los Angeles, it seems as though his words are racing, not always successfully, to keep up with his thoughts. He comes across less like the taciturn hitman of The Merry Gentleman and more like Billy Blaze, the character in Ron Howard's 1982 comedy Night Shift which made his name (Billy was a motormouth morgue assistant who turned his workplace into a brothel during the midnight hours).

"Yeah," says Keaton, asked about the incongruity, and pauses briefly before returning to the task in hand: promoting his movie. "My agent had said, 'This is really well written,' but I thought, 'Hitman, hired killer – not at all original. Then when I read it, I noticed that my character had no lines yet by page 15. I thought, 'Wow, he doesn't speak. Now we're talking! Now I've got something to work with.' I realised this is not a hitman movie at all. And I liked how spare it was; the quietness of it.

"I also liked that this was about imperfect people. They're not beautiful – Kelly is not unbeautiful but not that kind of crazy beautiful where you go 'Look!'. They're not cool, they're not the most popular, they're uncomfortable, they've screwed up. They just happen to find each other temporarily. They find this island and they're safe for a while and then the wave comes and washes them back out again, her her way and him his way." His voice tails off for a moment, almost sadly.

Mixed feelings can be detected when Keaton turns to his childhood. He was born just outside Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, into a large blue-collar, Catholic family: "Four boys, three girls. The ideal combination," he says, beaming. As the youngest, Michael was presumably the spoiled baby? "Yeah, everybody says that, but it's not totally true. You have to share everything. You get all the hand-me-downs. You get all the wrath of all your brothers and sisters.

"But you have that many more people who have to look after you. They're responsible. 'Give him a bath. Take him to school. Help him with his homework.' And the youngest always makes you laugh. He's the silly one. The second in line has an audience of one. I had an audience of six. They would think I was cute and I thought, 'This is pleasant'."

His mother, whom he remembers as "very, very devout", sent him to Catholic school until he was 13. "It was a lot like Doubt. A lot like that," Keaton says, referring to John Patrick Shanley's play (and screenplay) which painted an unvarnished picture of Irish-American Catholic schools in the early 1960s. "I was an altar boy, which I loved and am very proud of. It was strict, but also really nice. You got whacked on the knuckles and swatted on the bum and had to stand in the corner. I don't think it's a proper way to treat people, but you kind of got on with it. Nobody killed me, you know what I mean? And it makes you who you are."

Who is Michael Keaton? Not Michael Keaton, for a start: born Michael Douglas, he changed his professional name early in his career to avoid confusion with his then already well established namesake. He began in stand-up, first on the east coast and then on the west, moving into television, until Night Shift made his name. A suite of successful film comedies followed: Mr Mom, Johnny Dangerously and Burton's Beetlejuice, in which Keaton made a singular impression as the manic, cantankerous ghost-cum-exorcist.

Burton cast him again in his next movie, Batman. The fall-out from the fanboys was apocalyptic. Some 50,000 letters of complaint arrived at the offices of the studio, Warner Bros, whose share price slumped. It made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The director, however, stood firm. "I thought (Michael] would be perfect because he's got that look in his eye," he recalled later in Burton on Burton, a book-length interview. "It's like that guy you could see putting on a bat-suit; he does it because he needs to … He captured a certain subtle sadness in his character. There was a pent-up, bottled-up feeling to him."

Does Keaton concur with this view? "I don't know – sometimes I catch myself being dark and it's annoying. I think, 'Get over it.' I bore myself. But sometimes, like everybody, I'm sure I am obsessive." Back to his new movie again. "There's a scene in The Merry Gentleman with a wide shot way across the street, up these big steps towards a church. I wanted a little Christmas tree off in the corner by the door to remind people this was happening over the holiday season.

"I look through the camera set-up, look again, something's bothering me, camera starts rolling – and then I run across the street, through the traffic, up the steps, crawl under the tree, move it by an inch, run back and go, 'Yeah!' If you're not obsessive about details, you should be doing something else. I don't think it's crazy at all." He pauses for emphasis. "I don't."

Keaton's Batman sloughed off the camp memories of the 1960s television series and introduced the concept of the troubled superhero. And Keaton's performance comprehensively dispelled all the initial doubts. He reunited with the director to make a sequel, Batman Returns, then left the series – despite reportedly enormous blandishments – when Warners fired Burton in an ill-advised bid to lighten up the franchise. Yet thereafter their working relationship evaporated and Johnny Depp became Burton's male muse (asked about this, Keaton is either evasive or at a genuine loss to explain it).

As to what the future might hold for superannuated superheroes, Keaton is filming an action comedy, The Other Guys, for which most of the media attention so far has fastened upon his co-stars, Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg and Samuel L Jackson. Even Paris Hilton has attracted more publicity than he. Do people still regard him as Batman? "I think some do. That's all right. Nothing wrong with that. I am Batman." Another laugh. "I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.

"Sometimes I don't feel like an actor. Sometimes I speak about it like it was another job and then I go, 'Wait a minute, I am one!' I was out with a friend recently and we saw a man walking into Barneys – a tall, very good-looking black guy. I said, 'I think he's somebody, but I don't know who he is. I wonder if people ever look at me and think I'm somebody'." Keaton smiles as he tells this story, which is both against himself and subtly self-reaffirming. "My friend stopped and stared and said, 'Are you kidding me? You are somebody!' And I said, 'Oh, yes – that's right'." But he doesn't seem entirely convinced of it.

The Merry Gentleman is released on 4 December

This article was first published in The Scotsman Magazine on 14/11/09