Michael Keaton wants to start going by his real name, Michael Douglas… sort of
There's room enough in this town for two Michael Douglases, or so Keaton thinks.
Michael Douglas, count your days. Michael Keaton is coming for your name.
The Beeltejuice Beetlejuice star, whose birth name is actually Michael Douglas, recently told PEOPLE that he intends to start using the name professionally. Sort of. "I said, 'Hey, just as a warning, my credit is going to be Michael Keaton Douglas,'" Keaton said of his work on Knox Goes Away, which he recently directed. But "it totally got away from me. And I forgot to give them enough time to put it in and create that. But that will happen,” he vowed.
There is obviously the issue of Michael Douglas, the extremely famous star of films like Fatal Attraction and Wall Street, and son of Hollywood royalty Kirk Douglas.
Citing SAG mandates (the Screen Actors Guild forbids actors from signing certain contracts if their performer name is the same as another registered member's), Keaton recalled how he came up with the last name now widely associated with him. "I was looking through — I can’t remember if it was a phone book,” he said, "I must’ve gone, ‘I don’t know, let me think of something here.’ And I went, ‘Oh, that sounds reasonable.’”
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to both Michael Keaton and Michael Douglas for comment.
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This isn't the first time Keaton has expressed a desire to return to his roots. He's been talking about it since at least the early '90s, in fact. In a 1992 stop on the Batman Returns press tour, Keaton told Terry Wogan that he was forced to make the name change after signing onto one of his first big parts: "Because there were already two people in the union with the name Michael Douglas, I got a job and contractually you couldn't have people of the same name."
SAG's other Michael Douglas went by Mike, and hosted the daytime interview and entertainment program The Mike Douglas Show from 1961 to 1981.
"I finally met Michael Douglas," Keaton told Wogan, referring to the Basic Instinct star, "he's a good guy actually." But, Keaton pointed out, "that's not even his real name! I'm the only one who had the name. That's the irony here."
Well, kinda sorta. The Michael Douglas we know as Michael Douglas was in fact born Michael Douglas. But his father Kirk was the subject of one of the studio era's most rigorous Americanization regimes, having been born Issur Danielovitch. "There's a talk show host named Mike Douglas. Michael Douglas's father's real name was something else, my name is Michael Douglas, but they made me change it. I think something should be done about this," he joked.
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Keaton - Keaton Douglas, rather - isn't the only A-lister to express their desire for a name change. Emma Stone recently revealed that her real name is Emily, a name "that would be so nice" to be called by fans. She also opted for a name change at the outset of her career due to official SAG crediting rules. The same rules forced another Keaton, Diane, to change her name from Diane Hall in the 1960s.
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Keaton doesn't intend to change his name to the confusingly repetitive Michael Douglas, but the only slightly confusing Michael Keaton Douglas.
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