“I was in love with the West. I was glued to the little black- and-white television we had. Anything having to do with the West: horses, cowboys, the mountains, and hunting and fishing. I couldn’t get enough of it.” – Michael Keaton

Months later, in early December, he kicks back in Livingston’s Murray Hotel Bar, readying himself for several days of bird shooting. “It’s been a really exceptional year for birds,” he tells me. “And Hungarian partridge are so hard to hit, I love shooting them. There’s a covey in the fields by my house.”

Wearing a silky black puffer, a ventilated ball cap, and nursing a whiskey, he’s of little notice to the barflies. The Murray is where art meets roughneck Montana. Here, director Sam Peckinpah fired shots through the ceiling, actor Peter Fonda—off his Harley—quaffed martinis, and guitarist John Mayer partied with Katy Perry. Keaton sits at a corner table, reminiscing about his life here since the early 1980s, and of his childhood in rural Pennsylvania.

“We had this old farmhouse in Forest Grove, outside Pittsburgh, which my parents crowded us into,” he says. “We were seven kids, four brothers and three sisters. My mother’s dad had been a puddler in the steel mills—he shoveled molten steel, which was hot, hard work—and my dad came from country people. He never graduated high school. He earned his GED and became a civil engineer and surveyor. He liked to hunt so we lived in the country.” Keaton swirls his drink. “That farmhouse burned too. I remember not feeling sad but blown away by those flames—so dramatic, shooting up into the sky. It was stimulating to a little kid. What made me feel sad later was how much I loved that house.”

The ranch house that burned recently had been built in the early ’90s and though modest in scale was designed so tastefully that, in 1997, it made the cover of Architectural Digest. A second house, a log homesteader’s cabin moved and reconfigured by Keaton in the mid-1980s, shared the site. It still does, the view from both houses stretching to the Absaroka Mountains.

I have known Keaton since 1989, the summer of Batman— the movie of that year and one that made Keaton a superstar. He was moderately well-known for Night Shift, Mr. Mom, Beetlejuice [One] and Clean and Sober. But after Batman, his face blanketed billboards and the covers of most national magazines. That season, Keaton did not bask in Los Angeles’s or New York’s adoration. He camped by a river on the streamside acreage of his remote property. Drinking in local saloons, the cowpokes called him Bat.

I met him that August at Peter Fonda’s house in Paradise Valley over supper—an impromptu meal served at the kitchen table by Fonda’s wife Becky. The conversation was inconsequential, but I recall thinking, I’m bookended by superheroes: Fonda, who played a comic-book figure, Captain America, in the motorcycle epic Easy Rider, and Keaton as Batman. Arguably, each character defined the pop-art sensibilities of its era.

Keaton discourages questions about Batman and how it might have scrambled his life. He told Playboy in 1992, “I’m so tired of this f***ing question. I can’t stand it. Look, anytime you’re in a hit, it changes your life….” And here, of 2014’s Birdman (about an ex-superhero star making a comeback), a film that earned him a Golden Globe award for Best Actor and an Oscar Best Actor nomination, “When a movie makes a lot of money or you get critical praise, that has mileage.” He hesitates. “But you don’t take just any role. I like to use the baseball analogy. If you’re a good hitter, you wait for your pitch.”

He’s working out the budgeting for two new films, one in which he’ll star and one in which he’ll star and direct. He’s directed several films and as he notes, “I still can do the leading man thing, but I’m in a tiny percentile for my age. I don’t know how much longer it’s going to last.” Directing can last, as can hunting and fishing in Montana. His immediate focus is on fine-tuning the completion of his house here. “It’s done, but I’m building a gym, and there are still little things that aren’t [on] a punch list.”

Born Michael Douglas (in Hollywood, there already was a Michael Douglas), he was the youngest in his family, and as his brother George told me, “Mike was an outdoors kid all the way. And he loved to play with cowboy and Indian figurines. They were so real to him.”

“I was in love with the West,” Keaton says. “I was glued to the little black-and-white television we had. Anything having to do with the West: horses, cowboys, the mountains, and hunting and fishing. I couldn’t get enough of it.”

Later, he’d take brown Hershey Bar wrappers and paste them to his cheeks as sideburns—“to imitate Elvis Presley,” his brother remembered. “Mike always had a great imagination.” Keaton spent two years at Kent State, tried acting and loved it. In Pittsburgh, he worked for Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood at a public television station, did standup comedy and acted in plays. But it wasn’t until he was 21 and spent a summer teaching drama on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona that he decided to commit his life to art. The West afforded him an epiphany.

As he told Playboy, “That summer, I got totally blown away walking around those mesas and the desert … I wasn’t ready for the amount of physical space out there. I arrived late in the afternoon, and by the time we got to the school, it was dark—and the sky had lit up … I was overwhelmed and noticed that my heart was beating a lot faster … all the usual stimuli were gone.” He discovered, “I had nowhere to go except inside myself … I had to follow my heart.”

He says, “Arizona changed my life. It was mind-blowing and stunningly beautiful. When I got back to Pittsburgh, I knew what I was going to do: quit school and write or be an actor. It couldn’t have been clearer.”

George Douglas told me, “Mike is a very determined guy. He always says, ‘I’ll figure it out.’ I tell him, ‘That’s what we’ll put on your tombstone: I’ll figure it out.’”

That season, Keaton did not bask in Los Angeles’s or New York’s adoration. He camped by a river on the streamside acreage of his remote property. Drinking in local saloons, the cowpokes called him Bat.

Keaton’s first professional stop was weekends in New York, where he studied theater and did standup comedy. But a friend in Los Angeles convinced him to try that city, and he decamped. He performed standup a few years, acted in TV sitcoms and awaited success. He pushes aside his drink. “But you don’t care about that Hollywood bulls**t, do you? We’re talking Montana.”

A server approaches—a young woman in jeans and a T-shirt reading WISDOM (a town in the Big Hole Valley). She recognizes Keaton without acknowledging the fact. After ordering supper, he asks how many shifts she’s worked today and whether she likes horses. Two shifts, and yes, she does. He asks about the possibility of her caring for his horses next year, as his current handler may leave for college. “I’d love that,” she says, and gives him her info.

He is in no way flirting, yet it’s obvious that women appreciate him. I’m reminded of an evening in the mid-1990s when, returning to my room at the Murray Hotel, I found a note from Keaton saying he was at the Livingston Bar & Grille and to fall by if I were around. I found him seated with a pleasant-looking brunette whose name I didn’t catch. We chatted, and I asked what work she did.

“I’m in a television series called Friends,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. This was Courteney Cox.

She and Keaton dated for several years. She became a fixture at parties and the cutting horse events in which Keaton competed. Always congenial, she was just another megastar presence in Sweetgrass and Park counties.

A decade later, Keaton and his son, Sean Douglas (now a Grammy-nominated and an ACM and CMA Award-winning songwriter in Los Angeles) visited my girlfriend and me at her house in Santiago, Chile, while en route to a fishing extravaganza in Patagonia. Michael fidgeted on the patio as a uniformed maid served slippery, unfingerable hor d’oeuvres and his fishing-trip host described the helicopter flight they’d take from a yacht to a river where they’d stalk brown trout “that have never seen a fly.” Keaton has fished with world-class anglers, but this was the only moment I’d seen him edgy. It wasn’t the angling host. Perhaps it was the unfingerable hor d’oeuvres.

“I remember that trip,” Keaton says. “The helicopter flew the rafts out to be blown up first. So we wouldn’t have to wait.” He tilts his head. “My dad belonged to a club in Pennsylvania that was nothing like that.” As he wrote in the 2012 anthology Astream: American Writers on Fly Fishing, “Membership of the Montour Run Sportsman’s Club was made up of mill workers, railroad men, mechanics, farmers, and numbers runners. Italians, Poles, Germans— sons of immigrants. Men in hats, white short-sleeve shirts, who smoked cigars, drank beer, and swore.” Keaton’s people were not readily present in Patagonia— but their ilk was in Montana.

By the mid-1980s, having established a career in Los Angeles, he focused on Montana through his passion for angling. “I’d read these fly-fishing magazines and this was the Mecca.” After his first trip, in the early 1980s, “I was cooked, I was done. I had to be here.” He adds, “The Big Hole River was where I mostly fished. I could get a 7:30 a.m. flight in Burbank and be on the Big Hole by 1:30 in the afternoon. I’d fish until dark.”

By 1989, he’d finalized a divorce from his wife, Caroline McWilliams, also an actor, and was navigating the fame ignited by Batman. Sean then was 6, a boy who “plain fished” with his dad and who later, at Keaton’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, would remember Keaton’s fixation upon angling, saying, “I’ve seen you go from eating flies in Beetlejuice, to fly fishing, and fly tying, and fly research … it’s a fly obsession!”

Keaton chuckled at the ceremony but knew angling and his increased celebrity could be dicey. One evening, after a day on the river, he stopped at a bar and noticed a man glaring at him menacingly. Keaton finished his drink. The man still glared. Keaton remembers, “I walked over and said, ‘Why are you staring at me?’ He didn’t answer so I knocked his hat off, stepped back and fell across the legs of a woman who was seated. I left.”

“Why was he glaring?”

“Because I’m an actor?”

“Maybe he was a Beetlejuice fan.”

Keaton laughs. But he’s careful, having actively supported Democratic candidates in recent elections. His Instagram videos, pre-election, were insistently anti-Trump and Musk. In October he told his 1 million followers, many of them blue-collar, that “They don’t really respect you. They laugh at you behind your back. They think you’re stupid. They don’t want to hang out with you. They have nothing in common with you. They’re not your bros.”

He’s thoughtful after recalling the memory from the bar but regains equilibrium. Angling jaunts to Chile and New Zealand are planned, and, there is always fishing in Montana. “People who don’t fish can’t get it,” he says, “They don’t understand what happens to you. How present you are.”

I’m reminded of a day fishing on Keaton’s stretch of river, an August afternoon closing to evening as I’d switch from hoppers to whatever fly best imitates the hatch, a trout taking that fly, its fight through the riffles, its handling and release and the hike back across an expanse of yard, to the porch light waiting.

“The thing about fishing,” Keaton says, “is that you don’t have a choice except to be in the moment. It’s like riding a cutting horse. It’s that combination of being totally focused and totally at mercy. The thing I love about fly fishing more than anything is that … and I’ve never been a fish counter—I hate those expressions like ‘ripping lips’ … they’re just little f ***ing fish! They’re not hurting anyone.” A head shake. “I always look at it as a game. They’re all instinct, and we’re barely instinct. For a person who’s competitive, I know they’ll always win. I’ll never win. Ironically, I accept that.”

He feels comparably about cutting, a quasi-rodeo event that requires horse and rider to separate a cow from its herd and prevent it from returning. Cutting started for Keaton during the 1980s through Tom McGuane—who is not only a celebrated author but a member of the National Cutting Horse Association Hall of Fame. “I tell everybody,’ I wish I’d never gotten on a cutting horse and I wish I’d never caught a steelhead,’” Keaton says. “Because, with cutting, suddenly it’s 10 years later, and you’re in some shitty motel in northern California or Nevada, some dusty place, and you might win a saddle or $200.” He no longer competes. “I don’t think I ever won as much as $1,000. But when the event is happening, it’s so fun. Thrilling, such a rush! And your teammate is an animal.”

It’s not just sport that Keaton enjoys in Montana. It’s the relaxation he feels before its mountain vistas and sagebrush spaces. He keeps a truck at the Bozeman airport and “Driving home, there’s a spot on I-90,” he says, “where I’ll exhale and go ah.” L.A. has been relinquished, but “You know how it is. You’re relaxed but your brain picks up.”

Hard work is involved in fashioning a dramatic character, and the award-winning roles in which Keaton has starred were, in part, thought through in Montana. That work includes Birdman, which earned not just Keaton’s Oscar nomination for Best Actor, but ones for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography. An Academy Award was won by its director, Alejandro Iñárritu. Add to the list Spotlight, which took the Academy Award for Best Picture, then count his hipster role as an ATF agent in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, and another role as a CNN news producer in Live from Baghdad, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe … and dozens more. In 2021, he won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor and a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor for his role in the Hulu series, Dopesick. There, he played a West Virginia physician addicted to OxyContin. In an emotional acceptance speech for the SAG award, he dedicated it to his nephew, a casualty of drug use. “This is for my nephew, Michael, and my sister Pam. I lost Michael to drugs, and it hurts.”

A movie envisioned by Keaton in Montana (and partly filmed there) was Alejandro Iñárritu’s 2015 effort, The Revenant—his follow-up to Birdman. Keaton bought the 2002 survival and revenge novel of the same name by Michael Punke in a Livingston bookstore and thought, “Holy sh**, this is a movie.” He tried to obtain its film rights, “but somebody else already had them. It’s hard to get Westerns done. My friend, Alejandro did though.” He pauses. “And to this day, that is truly one of my favorite movies.” Keaton no doubt would have led in and possibly directed it. The Iñárritu film earned three Golden Globe awards and 12 Academy Award nominations in 2015. Iñárritu won Best Director, and the film’s star, Leonardo DiCaprio, Best Actor. While scouting locations, DiCaprio had stayed at the Murray.

Another role Keaton most certainly would have pondered as he fished Montana in the late ’80s, was the development of Bruce Wayne in Batman and Batman Returns. He told Playboy, “My take on Bruce Wayne: He’s essentially depressed and a little nuts, real dark and a couple of steps off,” but he’s powerful because he has money and because he saw his parents killed, which sent him into serious introspection and illness.” Despite the complexity of Wayne’s character, Keaton reportedly turned down a $15 million offer to star in a third film in the series, Batman Forever.

He explained to Entertainment Weekly, “I said to them, ‘This is a really interesting character with a dual personality’ … but when somebody says to you, ‘Does it have to be so dark?’… I thought, are we talking about the same character?”

The dark seriousness of his roles has been important to Keaton. As has their social consciousness. Bruce Wayne “still functions as a major force in society,” Keaton says, and the newsman, Walter “Robby” Robinson, in Spotlight, helps to uncover rampant sexual abuse among Boston’s clergy. In Worth, Keaton plays Kenneth Feinberg, who seeks compensation for the families of 9/11 victims. And in Dopesick, his character, Dr. Samuel Finnix, testifies in court against the drug behemoth, Purdue Pharma. Even Daryl Poynter, in Clean and Sober, advocates for sobriety.

In his SAG acceptance speech for Dopesick, Keaton added, “I’m so fortunate to do what I do, and so fortunate I have a job where I can be part of a production … that actually can spawn thought, conversation, actual change. I take pride in holding those people accountable for the victims of this opioid crisis.”

Directors and fellow stars hold him in high regard. Tim Burton told Esquire in 2014, “He’s a master improviser … that time with Michael, working on Beetlejuice and Batman, that was the most profoundly creative time in my career … I miss it.”

Samuel L. Jackson, who has acted with Keaton in several films, said to Esquire, “Batman and Beetlejuice are very different from one another. That’s a passage from darkness to light. Beetlejuice is dark, man. That’s some dark sh**. And it’s funny. But Michael brought gravitas to it.”

Iñárritu added, “He can … handle comedy and empathy, and with a profound depth to both.” Jackson said, “He’s just a very cool dude. Michael Keaton can talk about anything with anybody.”

The conversations I’ve had with him have ranged from fishing to politics to art and literature to the history of Montana to tales of backstage Hollywood. They have taken place in Chile and New York, but most congenially at his ranch or in the bars and restaurants of Park and Sweetgrass counties. I’ve watched him teach his 3-year-old grandson, River, how to hop on stones across a creek, Michael crossing then hopping back, crossing then hopping, until River learned it. I’ve seen him trade hilarious stories with novelist Carl Hiaasen at a dinner for 12 by the Yellowstone River, then sat beside him at Pine Creek Lodge as we listened to Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell serenade an outdoor audience that included Jeff Bridges and John Mayer. I’ve sat with him on the Fourth of July at a table of celebrants including the McGuanes, Tom and Meridith Brokaw, composer Dave Grusin and his wife Nan Newton, Gretel Erlich and her husband Neal Conan, as well as Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, each loving the companionship of friends and the surroundings of a private fishing club. I’ve stood with Marni and Michael, watching a rodeo parade in Livingston then dancing with Marni to a band in Main Street. I’ve watched Michael enjoy countless weddings, memorials and musical evenings at Audrey Hall’s ranch in Paradise Valley. I’ve never seen him discontent.

Back at the Murray, we’re speaking of films and how he must return to work. I praise his ability to disappear inside a character and his performance in 2023’s Knox Goes Away, about a contract killer who gradually succumbs to dementia. It’s a dark, deathly performance and I tell him, “I thought, ‘I know Michael, but I don’t know this guy.’”

He brightens. “Yeah, that’s great. Oh thanks, I love to hear that. Because it’s so hard to do.” Pausing. “It’s why I don’t grant that many interviews. The more you’re exposed and the more people know about you, the less they’re gonna buy into the character you play.”

“I felt similarly about your disappearance into the physician character in Dopesick.”

“Good.” He finishes his drink. “People will forget about you anyway,” he says. “It’s not just Hollywood. You assume people still think about you and they don’t. Nobody’s thinking about you. They’re thinking about themselves. Which they should.”

Our server has us in mind and she approaches to ask if everything’s okay. “Thanks, yeah,” Keaton says. “How about one more drink, but a short one? I’ve got a long drive ahead.”