Michael Keaton has said that the Mr. Mom movie script was rewritten because he looked young.
On Monday's episode of the SmartLess podcast—hosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes—the actor, 72, spoke out about the 1983 film comedy. In it, he played the role of Jack, an engineer who learned the difficulties of being a stay-at-home dad after losing his job.
"Mr. Mom to me was a genre changer, right? Nobody had done a movie like that," Arnett said. "You did it with such ease, and the great part was, it wasn't putting down a stay-at-home parent. In fact, it was pumping it up.
"To me, that was what was so interesting about it. Especially in that time, those were different days back then, but you did it in this way that kind of took that on and flipped it on its head."
Keaton told listeners that, while he liked the script, he didn't initially think he could play Jack.
"I looked like I was about 10 years old, and we had to kind of write that in because I thought, 'OK, let's say he married young. How do we really believe this?'" the Beetlejuice star said. "There was a lot of rewriting on the set, I will say."
The Golden Globe winner added that the script was tweaked for another reason, too.
"It was already funny, but there were things—because the director who's a talented guy, but he was not a comedy guy—we had to work on, let's say," Keaton said, appearing to refer to Mr. Mom director Stan Dragoti. "And there was a lot of rewriting going on."
Newsweek reached out to Keaton's publicist via email for additional comment.
Keaton continued: "It was a great cast. What I dug about it was a.) it was funny. I like playing fathers because I like being a father. I liked what it was about. And it was ahead of its time in that, at the time, the U.S. economy was not very good. The unemployment was not great. And the idea of a woman going out into the workforce, as crazy as this sounds, whenever we shot that—80-something—was not that unusual, but it was f***ing unusual by comparison, right?"
Keaton is a dad to Sean Douglas. The Batman actor wed his late wife Caroline McWilliams in 1982, and they welcomed their only son in 1983. The pair divorced in 1990, and McWilliams died in February 2010.
During the podcast episode, Keaton said he was surrounded by women growing up, having a mom and three sisters. He added that "most people who work for me are women," though he "didn't plan it that way."
"So I liked that whole setup and the premise," Keaton said of the Mr. Mom script.
In an interview with Elle in 2010, the Emmy award winner was asked if his siblings had taught him anything about women.
"Nothing. What helped me was having an extraordinary mom and just watching my sisters," Keaton told the outlet at the time. "The woman I was married to [Caroline McWilliams] had no brothers.
"When our son, Sean, was in his teens, one of the greatest things she ever said was: 'I really wish I would have had a son before I ever dated anybody.'
"I think one reason I really like women and like working with women is because of my sisters. But I'll tell you another thing: When you hear guys going on and on saying, 'Oh, God, I love women'—don't trust those f***in' guys. Guys who go on and on about loving women usually don't."
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