Michael Keaton’s Dedication to a ‘90s Comedy Freaked Out Ben Stiller

Michael Keaton seems pretty happy to revive his famous ‘80s and ‘90s movie characters these days — whether it’s the iconic DC superhero Batman or the iconic undead sex criminal Beetlejuice. One property that has yet to receive the nostalgia-baiting sequel treatment is Multiplicity, director Harold Ramis’ 1996 comedy in which Keaton plays a stressed-out family man who ends up being cloned by a suspiciously friendly geneticist — because when an affluent middle-aged white guy is having trouble getting some errands done, scientific ethics be damned!

Things get even wackier from there. Just one clone isn’t getting enough everyday chores done, so Keaton’s character Doug Kinney clones himself again. And then things really spiral out of control when one of the clones decides to clone themselves, creating a copy of a copy with impaired cognitive faculties. Amazingly, this movie has a relatively happy ending that somehow doesn’t involve Doug digging three graves in his backyard. 

Making a movie in which Keaton plays most of his scenes opposite himself was a major technological undertaking back in 1996. Some scenes even required Keaton to act alongside first-person footage of previous takes, which had to be captured by an off-screen crew member wielding a video camera.

At other times, Keaton had to act in front of a green screen with a performer best described as “What if the Gimp from Pulp Fiction celebrated St. Patrick’s Day?”

Keaton’s performance was extra-challenging because, for some vague, arguably unscientific reason, each of Doug’s clones has a distinctly different personality — one is slovenly, one is prim and proper and one wears a rubber boot as a hat. So Keaton was often tasked with playing multiple versions of Doug, in multiple scenes, in a single day. 

To tackle this task, Keaton devised a method that could help him keep track of which character he was playing in a given scene: a chart, with each variation on Doug assigned a number. Which makes sense — but it seemingly weirded a celebrity guest. 

As Keaton recently told GQ, the Multiplicity gig was “exhausting” but “tremendous fun.” He also recalled that a young Ben Stiller visited the set one day. Even though the two actors had never met one another, Stiller asked Keaton what he was working on and, naturally, Keaton showed him the chart. “He kind of looked,” explained Keaton, “and didn’t say anything, and just walked out and walked away.” 

Why did Stiller randomly back away like Homer Simpson into a bush? Keaton never actually learned what was behind Stiller’s sudden exit: “I never talked to him since… I have no fucking idea if he went, ‘Oh fuck, I don’t even want to know about that.’”

Here’s hoping that Season Two of Severance doesn’t feature a storyline featuring clones or doppelgangers of any kind, otherwise Ben Stiller might just bail at any moment.

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