It’s (nearly) showtime! The highly anticipated trailer for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is coming soon—but first, Tim Burton has given a first look at the sequel for his eponymous horror comedy to Entertainment Weekly.
Front and center, of course, is Michael Keaton as you-know-which bio-exorcist; in the 1988 film, he was summoned to get rid of the humans who’d moved into the home of a ghost couple not quite ready to let go, and subsequently unleashed chaos in the lives of the Deetz family—including high-strung artist Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and teen goth icon Lydia (Winona Ryder).
“He just got back into it,” Burton said of Keaton’s return to the iconic character nearly 40 years later. “It was kind of scary for somebody who was maybe not that overly interested in doing it. It was such a beautiful thing for me to see all the cast, but he, sort of like demon possession, just went right back into it.” The director added, “Unless it felt right, he had no burning desire to do it.”
In fact, the original cast all felt that way, Burton confirmed. In the sequel, Ryder, Keaton, and O’Hara are joined by Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega as Lydia’s daughter, Astrid; The Leftovers’ Justin Theroux as Rory (so far, there are no other details on him, but he’s in the new image you can see below); and Poor Things’ Willem Dafoe as an afterlife character. The story of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice picks up after a death in the Deetz family, when Beetlejuice is once again summoned to deal with life after death in all the ways he knows best.
Burton revealed it’s Lydia who brings him back. “I so identified with the Lydia character, but then you get to all these years later, and you take your own journey, going from cool teenager to lame adult, back and forth again,” he said. “That made it emotional, gave it a foundation. So that was the thing that really truly got me into it.”
He emphasized the importance of retaining what made the first Beetlejuice so special. “It needed a back-to-basics, handmade quality,” Burton said, and added that the experience “reenergized why I love making movies.” He also confirmed that the sequel’s effects would not be primarily CG, but rather lean on the stop-motion style that so defined the original film.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opens September 6.
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