'60 Minutes' Michael Keaton interview covers his love of Pittsburgh

The CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes,” known for its ticking stopwatch, devoted a good portion of its program Sunday night to discovering what makes Michael Keaton tick.

Keaton, a Robinson Township native, has achieved enormous success as an A-List actor in Hollywood for the past three decades. He has sustained his career by taking risks and careening from madcap comedy to deadly serious topics in his choice of movie roles.

The risks have paid off and now Keaton is playing a doctor in a Hulu miniseries out this month called “Dopesick.” It’s about the country’s opioid epidemic and correspondent Jon Wertheim reveals that for Keaton, the story has a personal connection.

Keaton’s nephew died as a result of problems related to fentanyl and heroin.

Wertheim asked Keaton what it’s like to have such a personal connection to a role.

“You have to remove the emotion and, like I keep saying, ‘What’s the job at hand?’ I’m just a storyteller,” Keaton said.

Michael Keaton says his latest role hits close to home. In the mini-series “Dopesick,” Keaton plays a doctor in a coal-mining town overwhelmed by OxyContin. Keaton tells Jon Wertheim that he lost a nephew to fentanyl and heroin. https://t.co/X9Bo3fZNnq pic.twitter.com/YfjF56iqx3

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 25, 2021

The role is a far cry from early Keaton comedies like “Night Shift” and “Beetlejuice,” lighthearted fare that could have ended up typecasting him.

The “60 Minutes” piece focuses on the broad range of roles he has taken on. Something Wertheim refers to as “his staggering versatility” and “character hopscotch,” which Keaton downplays in the interview.

“You talk about range, it’s flattering but range schmange, you know,” Keaton said. “I don’t think of it in terms of — you played that and you were funny and then you were a sad man — that’s not really, to me, range.” With further prodding, Keaton does end up admitting that there is range within a character.

The piece goes on to demonstrate how the acting bug bit Keaton at an early age when his family won a black-and-white television in a raffle. It was life-changing. He loved watching old Westerns and “wanted to be those people.”

After one year of college at Kent State, he dropped out and committed himself to acting and performing stand-up comedy.

The segment documents how playing Batman in 1989 helped catapult Keaton to elite status in Hollywood. Twenty-five years later, he would win a Golden Globe for playing the lead in “Birdman,” which he tells Wertheim was “mostly the hardest role” he’s ever had.

“I was never afraid to go to dark or scary or really, really, really raw places ever,” the actor said.

Wertheim reports that Keaton returns home to the Pittsburgh area often and would spend more time here if he weren’t so busy in Hollywood.

Actor Michael Keaton grew up the youngest of seven kids, raised in a working-class town outside Pittsburgh. “Everybody has hard memories, the embarrassing tough times and the down times. You know, no money ... [But] that's just part of the deal.” https://t.co/Qc4Xz9vAil pic.twitter.com/Zw0rgNmJbe

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 25, 2021

The “60 Minutes” story mentioned that Keaton is an investor in a construction company called Nexii that plans to make environmentally friendly alternatives to concrete. A site has not been selected, but he hopes to bring it to Western Pennsylvania.

“I get this and I actually like it,” said Keaton. “If I’m going to have an opportunity to do anything — put my money where my mouth is — you can’t just have an opinion about climate change anymore. The bill’s come due.”