Michael Keaton’s going back to his roots.
The Beetlejuice Beetlejuice actor recently told People he plans to revert to a version of his birth name, Michael Douglas, for future projects.
When he was starting out in his career in the ’70s, he chose a stage name because of a Screen Actors Guild rule that prohibits members from using the same professional name as another member.
The SAG already had a Michael Douglas — the Oscar-winning Wall Street actor — and a Mike Douglas, so the Batman star had to get creative.
“I was looking through — I can’t remember if it was a phone book,” he recalled. “I must’ve gone, ‘I don’t know, let me think of something here.’ And I went, ‘Oh, that sounds reasonable’.”
Going forward, the Oscar nominee wants to go by Michael Keaton Douglas. He said he intended to do so on last year’s Knox Goes Away, which he directed and starred in, but it “totally got away from me” while he was busy making the movie.
“I forgot to give them enough time to put it in and create that. But that will happen,” he said.
His newest venture, the follow-up to his 1988 hit Beetlejuice, will still list his name as Michael Keaton, People reported.
He’s certainly not the only actor who’s had to change course due to SAG’s name rule. Emma Stone, for example, was given the name Emily Stone at birth, but couldn’t use it professionally because the union already had one.
She, too, wishes people would call her by her real name. “I would like to be Emily,” she said earlier this year.
Similarly, Anne Hathaway said back in 2021 that she doesn’t like to be referred to by her stage name in the real world.