Michael Keaton is back as the eponymous “Ghost With the Most” in Tim Burton’s long-awaited “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which is opening the Venice Film Festival this month before opening in theaters in September. The actor recently told GQ magazine that one of his stipulations for returning as Beetlejuice was for the sequel not to beef up his screen time. After all, the character is only on screen in the 1988 original for 17 minutes. Beetlejuice’s popularity has only exploded since then, but that didn’t mean he wanted the character to become the star of the show in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
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“The idea was, no, no, no, you can’t load it up with Beetlejuice, that’ll kill it,” Keaton said about his return. “I think the Beetlejuice character doesn’t drive the story as much as he did in the first one. He’s more part of the storyline in this one as opposed to the first one, which is a case of, this thing comes in and drives the movie a little bit.”
The “Beetlejuice” sequel reunites Keaton with Burton and original cast members Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara. Newcomers include Jenna Ortega and Willem Dafoe. The plot centers on the strained relationship between Ryder’s Lydia Deetz and her daughter, Ortega’s Astrid. Keaton told SiriusXM in March that the mother-daughter backbone in the sequel gives it an emotional heft the original did not have.
“The [original] was so fun and exciting visually. [The sequel is] all that but really beautiful and interestingly emotional here and there,” Keaton said. “I wasn’t ready for that. It’s great.”
Another stipulation Keaton had for the sequel was to make sure Beetlejuice didn’t get a sensitivity check in order to update him for the times. As GQ reports: “As for the character himself, there was not a ton of updating to be done there. Beetlejuice, debauched sicko in 1988, remains a debauched sicko in our more enlightened era.”
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“He’s a thing. He’s more of a thing than a he or a she, he’s more of an it,” Keaton said. “And I’m not saying ‘it’ to be politically correct. I just viewed it as a force more than anything. I mean, there’s definitely strong male energy, like stupid male energy, which I love. You don’t want to touch that because it’s not like you go, ‘Well, it’s a new year and this thing would now act like that.’”
Keaton told People magazine earlier this year that shooting the “Beetlejuice” sequel was “the most fun I’ve had on set in a long time.”
“On one hand, you’d go, ‘Well, of course it’s the most fun. It looks like fun.’ As you know, it doesn’t always work like that,” Keaton said. “The one thing that [Tim] and I decided on early, early, early on from the beginning, if we ever did it again, I was totally not interested in doing something where there was too much technology. It had to feel handmade. It’s the most exciting thing. When you get to do that again after years of standing in front of a giant screen, pretending somebody’s across the way from you, this is just enormous fun.”
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” opens in theaters Sept. 6 from Warner Bros.
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