Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo are shown in a scene from “Spotlight.” (Photo credit: Open Road Films)

By Steven Rea
The Philadelphia Inquirer

“My persona has been hijacked,” Boston Globe editor Walter “Robby” Robinson declared last year, writing about what it felt like to witness a certain Hollywood star assume his identity, his mannerisms, his walk, his talk.

“If Michael Keaton robbed a bank, the police would quickly have me in handcuffs,” he added.

Keaton, on the phone recently and reminded of Robinson’s remarks, laughed.

“Robby was so easy to play, in a way,” said the actor, part of an ace ensemble — Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, John Slattery, Brian d’Arcy James, Liev Schreiber — who wear the ID cards of real-life Globe reporters and editors in Tom McCarthy’s thrilling journalism drama, “Spotlight.”

Robinson, whom Keaton plays with the perfect calibration of accent and comportment, was the editor of the paper’s Spotlight unit, a small troop of reporters allowed to dig deep and go long on big stories. In 2003, the Globe won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the Spotlight team’s series on the Boston Archdiocese sex-abuse scandals. Pedophile priests, scores of them — a nightmare that left hundreds of victims psychologically scarred for life.

“Spotlight” looks all but sure to be among the 2016 Academy Award contenders for best picture. It deftly recounts the process by which Robinson’s team launched its investigation, the myriad leads its reporters followed, the roadblocks encountered, the conflicts with Globe higher-ups, the survivors interviewed, the lawyers, the pols, the parishioners, the clergy. The story is complicated, but McCarthy and screenwriter Josh Singer tell it with a sure-handed mix of the procedural and the personal.

For Keaton, in his first role since the groundbreaking, Oscar-winning “Birdman,” it was imperative that he honor his real-life counterpart — without resorting to posturing or false heroics.

“You have a responsibility when you play real people,” Keaton explained. “It’s that fine line of drilling down and getting information from someone and at the same time not taking advantage of them, or manipulating them. In this case, that would have been hard to do — because Robby is such a good guy.

“But there are a lot of people you play who have been through really horrible experiences, and to take advantage of that — that would be tough for me.”

Keaton cites his experience making the 1988 drama “Clean and Sober” — his first break from the early comedies (“Mr. Mom,” “Beetlejuice”) that made him a star — in which he played a Philadelphia real estate agent struggling with substance abuse.

“I had to talk to a lot of people who were alcoholics and drug addicts when I was preparing to do ‘Clean and Sober,’” he said. “And it’s tough, because at a certain point I started feeling like this is really a selfish act on my part. People are struggling with something, and going through rough times, and I just want what I can get from them to inform my performance.”

“Spotlight,” he said, was different.

“It was so pleasant to hang out with Robby. He was generous with his information. With all of these journalists, I think, all they wanted was to be represented accurately.”

(Robinson left his post at the Globe to teach journalism at Northeastern University; he returned to the paper last year as editor-at-large.)

For director McCarthy — who has long been an actor, too — Keaton’s work in “Spotlight” was what he expected it to be. And yet, it was also surprising.

“It’s not flashy,” said McCarthy, reached in Los Angeles. “And that’s the kind of acting I’m always attracted to. It’s so well-realized, so completely thorough. Just watch his body posture, his stillness. He doesn’t bring a lot of his energy and his kicks into it. It’s a very, very well-crafted and nuanced performance.”
It is, in short, 180 degrees from the volatile, narcissistic, self-lacerating movie star in search of redemption that Keaton portrayed in “Birdman.” That performance garnered a best actor Oscar nomination; his turn in “Spotlight” could put him in contention for the supporting actor prize.

“I love ensemble films. I’ve done a bunch of them,” Keaton said. “Way back when, my agent used to say, ‘No, no, no, you need to be the guy.’ But I just want to do good work. I want to work with good actors and good directors … .

“But this one, ‘Spotlight,’ was tricky, because Robby was their leader. Robby was the captain. Robby was coach. And you can’t not address that as the actor, to some degree. But you also don’t want to show up on the set and say, ‘Here’s how we’re going to do this!’

“You have to be part of the whole, which I love being … . And, also, at the same time, quietly, subtly, I guess, I was thinking that I need to take the reins here.”

Keaton — a Pittsburgh native who started in the industry working for the city’s PBS affiliate, WQED, and who counts “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” among his earliest credits — spends as much time as he can on his 1,000-acre ranch in Montana. In fact, before he did “Birdman,” he had kind of disappeared on that ranch, retreating from showbiz life for a very long spell. He promises not to do that again, and he acknowledges that making Alejandro Iñárritu’s “Birdman” was a pivot point in his career, his life.

“I’m not stupid, and I realize that I’m in a business where success translates to a career,” he said, suggesting that a lot of people — “inside the industry, and the audiences, the public” — probably didn’t know he had that Riggan Thomson/Birdman dude in him.

“But for me,” he said, warming up for a rich baseball metaphor, “it was like, ‘Oh boy, this is the pitch. This is the pitch you hit, this is the one you know how to do.’

“However,” he cautioned, “it’s a 102-miles-per-hour fastball that hasn’t been thrown your way in a long time. So even though you know you’ve got it, do you have it now, at this minute? … I mean right now, because who’s ready to get handed something like that?”

Well, Keaton was ready to get handed that — and in “Birdman” he hit it out of the park.

In “Spotlight,” he’s more of the “player coach,” said his director, McCarthy. But Keaton’s still batting like a pro.