Keaton’s latest film sees him starring as Ray Kroc, the controversial mastermind behind McDonald’s national (and later global) expansion. Keaton spoke to Variety about how he got into the character of a man whose corporation has fed billions of people over the last several decades.
Keaton highlights that one of the most important aspects of playing a real-life individual is to “lock in” on that person’s essence. He says, “Really, from what John [Lee Hancock, director] started to tell me and what the writer had given me. I watched a documentary on Ray and I wasn’t into it long — seven or eight minutes — and I went, ‘I got it.’ It’s not like, ‘Oh, I got it, I understand everything.’ It was that I locked into what I thought the essence of the guy was. It immediately put me on the general highway. Then I had to narrow it down, and narrow it down and winnow it down, and get into the details. You never do an impression, and yet I felt somewhat obligated to kind of simulate his attitude and his sound. You know, that Illinois-ish, not quite Chicago-ish Midwest kind of thing. Then once you start looking in his wardrobe and then you start to put on the wardrobe.”
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