The accent Michael Keaton nearly killed a crew member with
It’s not often you hear of a bad accent nearly killing someone, but Michael Keaton once concocted an accent so bizarre that he feared it might take someone out.
(Credits: Far Out / Miramax / YouTube Still)
Film » Cutting Room Floor
Sat 1 February 2025 13:30, UK
An accent can often make or break a whole movie, or career. Brad Pitt’s infamously bad Irish accent in Snatch or Troy could convince you the man has zero talent if they’re his only performances you’ve seen, Jared Leto’s Italian accent effectively broke the camel’s back of House of Gucci and Dick Van Dyke has admitted that accent in Marfy Poppins was the worst cockney accent to (dis)grace the screen. And while a bad accent can make a viewer want to die inside from cringe, it’s not often you hear of a bad accent nearly killing someone. However, Michael Keaton once concocted an accent so bizarre and left field that he feared it might take someone out.
After two stints as the Caped Crusader for Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns, Keaton was on a mission to escape the clutches of superhero stardom and diversify the kinds of roles he was taking. The rest of the 1990s saw this play out well for him as he starred in films like Jackie Brown, One Good Cop and The Paper. However, the ultimate opportunity to break the Batman-shaped mould came in the form of Shakespeare. In 1993, he was cast as the night constable Dogberry in Kenneth Brannagh’s Much Ado About Nothing.
While Branagh’s star-studded, sun-soaked retelling wasn’t necessarily the most traditional or seriously theatrical, it still offered Keaton a chance to prove his acting chops given the very fact it was based on the bard. However, where most of his co-stars, including Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves and Kate Beckinsale, simply delivered the Elizabethan verse in their American accents, Keaton decided to take another route. A “weird kind of Celtic” route.
“In my life, I had taken two Shakespeare classes. That’s it,” he admitted to Entertainment Weekly. However, the consequences of this poor preparation could have been particularly bad.
On set, as with many Shakespeare productions, was a Bard expert who many were worried might simply pass away upon hearing Keaton’s unique choice of accent. Old and clearly passionate, he pled with Brannagh, “This poor man in his 80s with a straw hat on, God, he was so nice. He was watching me, going, ‘He can’t do this. Please don’t let him do this.”
To the expert, Keaton’s vocal embodiment of the self-satisfied leader of a group of bumbling watchmen was a life-threatening sacrilege. But given Branagh’s insistence on letting the actor find his own non-traditional interpretation of Dogberry, he ignored the advice of the on-set Shakespeare expert, “Kenneth went, ‘No, no, no, no. Trust me, this is good. Keep doing what you’re doing.” Once again, Branagh demonstrates the same kind of hubris it takes to make a Frankenstein adaptation quite so ambitious and bad.
The end result is what you’d imagine would happen if Beetlejuice himself attempted to do Shakespeare, with the physical comedy mostly hitting the mark. Still, the accent walked a fine line between ghost with the most and unintelligible. Regardless of Keaton’s accent, the film was pretty much a commercial and critical hit – even if it has been somewhat forgotten over time. However, the two elements that were criticised were the casting of the previous Batman and Reeves for his acting. Although, at least no one can actually say a Shakespeare expert was harmed in the making of this mediocre movie.
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Kenneth BranaghMichael Keaton
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