After more than 35 years, Tim Burton finally found the secret ingredient needed to Beetlejuice back to life.
In promoting Beetlejuice Beetlejuicewhich premieres in theaters on September 6, returning stars Michael Keaton and Catherine O’Hara thanked Jenna Ortega for helping the director bring his long-awaited sequel to life after initially working together on Netflix’s Wednesday.
Keaton noted that the actress “literally didn’t exist” when the original film premiered in 1988, and told Burton for USA Today“She’s born, and at the end you do something with her. And then you think: Wait a minute. Her? It? If she’s not there, we might never get it done.”
“We had to wait until you survived,” O’Hara joked to her 21-year-old co-star Ortega, who quipped, “The forces in the room shifted.”
In the original film, a recently deceased couple (played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) enlist the help of the titular ghoul (Keaton) to scare away the yuppie family that moved in after their deaths. But when the family’s death-obsessed teenager, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), encounters the mischievous ghost, all hell breaks loose in the Connecticut house.
Jenna Ortega as Astrid and Winona Ryder as Lydia in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Warner Bros.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice In “The Movie,” Lydia returns home with her daughter Astrid (Ortega) and her boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux) after the death of her father Charles (played by Jeffrey Jones in the original). At the funeral, Lydia is reunited with her stepmother Delia (O’Hara reprises her role), while Beetlejuice returns to wreak havoc once again.
Ortega said working with a professional like Keaton made her job “very easy.” “It’s hard not to get immersed in the world when you have people with mold on their teeth and a guy who’s trapped in a box full of water and keeps trying to give you a key,” she explained.
And although Ortega was born almost 15 years after the original film, he had a feel for the enduring fan base for Beetlejuice when they were filming in the same Vermont town as the original. “People would come up to me and show me photo albums with Tim’s signature in them,” the actress recalls.
Ortega previously played the role of Wednesday Addams in Burton’s Netflix spin-off The Addams Familywhich premiered in 2022 and is currently filming season 2.
