Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Tue 25 August 2026 5:00, UK
Michael Keaton can be stubborn when he wants to be, but it’s only because he has spent a career fighting for the best.
Whether he has been saving the world as Batman or more recently drugged up on Dopesick, the usual gamut of his roles takes on something of a darkness, a sinister edge, a powerful streak that he can’t help but indulge in time and time again when he makes an appearance on screen.
At the other end of that spectrum was a romantic comedy romp where the actors got to flounce about in ruffs and enunciate in the floweriest language you could ever imagine… In other words, it was the 1993 film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, and even though Keaton clearly wanted his classic actor status, he still needed a bit of convincing when it came to Shakespeare.
Amid a stacked cast that included the likes of Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Denzel Washington, and Keanu Reeves, Keaton perhaps was billed a little further down the call sheet than he might have liked in his role as the local constable Dogberry – to be fair, not many would probably relish being seen as a bit thick, as the character was.
However, as much as the actor arrived on the set with his guard up, he left an entirely new man. “That’s a movie where I said, ‘I can’t do this,’ and it ended up being probably one of my top five experiences ever,” he recalled in a 2011 interview. His initial concerns were at least understandable: Shakespeare is inaccessible at the best of times, let alone when you’ve not got a clue how to speak his language.
But in the end, Keaton came off all the better for keeping an open mind, despite admitting that “I didn’t really know what to do” in the first instance… However, he hailed Branagh, who both led the cast and sat in the director’s chair, for the fact that he “didn’t get scared off by my unorthodox approach, he embraced it and was really hands-on, thankfully.”
Even still, it sometimes felt as though aliens had landed in the heart of 16th-century Renaissance Italy. It was literally like acting in another language. I had taken maybe one two-day Shakespearean class in my life, so I had no knowledge,” Keaton said, but in that sense, he also had no choice but to throw himself straight in the deep end.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
As such, you could imagine it being a far more fulfilling shoot than just sitting in a trailer all day, in a nameless site in the middle of nowhere, before you get trotted out to film a couple of meaningless and banal scenes. There was actually a learning process and a life enrichment to be had on Much Ado About Nothing – who’d have thought it?
For Keaton’s part, he came away from that film with a much more profound appreciation for the acting craft, not to mention a far greater understanding of The Bard’s lingo than he ever did before. It changed his life and career in ways he couldn’t have predicted when he first began, but just don’t make him wear one of those stupid ruffs ever again.
