Michael Keaton’s Simple Trick on SNL
Michael Keaton is a movie star who has the air of just a regular dude.
That much was evident during his Saturday Night Live monologue last night, where he played the straight man to Mikey Day and Andy Samberg. The comedians were dressed as Beetlejuice, the beloved bio-exorcist character that Keaton reprised in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice earlier this year. As Day and Samberg got silly around him, mugging in their striped suits, Keaton stepped into the role of the bemused observer—that is, until they goaded him into doing Beetlejuice’s deep bellowing voice himself at the very last minute.
The opening was a good example of Keaton’s gift for turning on his weirdness when the situation requires it, a trait he would trot out as the night went on. Because as “dadcore” as the actor can seem when out of character, he has the ability to get odd in a way that works perfectly for sketch comedy, a format that shows the depths of his talent for transformation.
Instead, the show sprung to life when it gave Keaton a role he could really sink his teeth into. Take, for instance, the sketch “Uber Game Show.” In it, the cast member Ego Nwodim played a rideshare driver who hosts a Cash Cab–like game show, except all of the questions were about conspiracy theories. When Keaton slid into the front seat as Anthony, a random friend of Nwodim’s who just happened to join the trip to the airport, he exuded the uncomfortable energy of someone with whom you wouldn’t want to get too deep into conversation.
[Read: What we all forgot about Beetlejuice]
Vaping and wearing a gray mullet wig, Keaton’s Anthony was smugly confident in his beliefs that the vaccine killed “Ghislaine Maxwell’s husband” and that pigeons were fake. Keaton dove into the part, adjusting his posture and affecting a gruff voice with a hint of New York–ese. A combination of twitchy and self-assured, the character seemed to have a mind that had been shaped by the internet’s darkest corners.
The same could be said for the enthusiastic choreographer he portrayed in another sketch about the filming of a new Halloween movie. Keaton’s “stunt-movement coordinator,” Beau, was utterly confident in his idea that the slasher character Michael Myers should have a little flash when stalking his kill. He threw spins and body rolls, for instance, into a demonstration of Myers’s walk to his unsuspecting victims. With his bowl cut, Beau had a bit of the Christopher Guest creation Corky St. Clair from Waiting for Guffman to him, but Keaton added his own intensity. The humor came in part from the fact that Beau couldn’t see how on earth someone might think that his concept wasn’t the right one.
If there was a unifying trait among all of the people Keaton embodied on SNL, it was that despite their differences, they were convinced of their own importance. In “Tableside,” Keaton didn’t wear a wild costume or use a silly voice, but he was just as committed as a father who bonded with the waitress making tableside guacamole because she reminded him of a former flame. The dinner was ostensibly to celebrate the impending wedding of his daughter, but Keaton’s dad launched into a series of monologues about a former love interest. He delivered the speeches with passion, an energy he also brought when he played a skydiving instructor who’d just heard he’d lost custody of his kids, this week’s video from the Gen Z comedy trio Please Don’t Destroy.
As an actor, Keaton has long had the talent for surprise. It’s one of the reasons he was such a good Batman in Tim Burton’s movies about the famed DC superhero. He shifts multiple times over the course of those movies, playing Bruce Wayne as both billionaire figurehead and nerdy investigator, and then stepping into the cowl and growling as his masked alter ego.
Perhaps because Keaton seems like such an everyman, he knows that everyone has a strangeness bubbling up inside. When Keaton unleashes that, it’s indisputable comic gold.