After 30-plus years away from the character, Michael Keaton had some doubts about finding Beetlejuice again for Tim Burton‘s forthcoming sequel, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.
“There’s been so much merchandising of it, I had to drop back to where it started,” Keaton told Empire. “I had to go, ‘What was my unusual imagination even thinking about when I was developing it in the first place?’ As opposed to seeing a coffee mug or a golf-club cover [adorned with Betelgeuse’s face].”
The character is no longer just some weird product of his imagination; It is now iconic in the Tim Burton canon — if not the canon of cinema itself.
“The ubiquity of Beetlejuice as a character in the culture created its own challenges. “”That was fucking weird,” Keaton admitted to Empire. “To be honest with you – I’m being very frank – it was off-putting, to look and go, ‘I don’t want to look like all these little things, fuck that – what was the thing that started this?’”
According to Burton and and Keaton’s co-stars, the actor seems to have found it.
“It was like he was possessed by a demon, because he just went right back into it,” said Burton. “It was insane,” recalled Catherine O’Hara. “Insane.” Jenna Ortega put it thusly: “It was like an animal with a gun had just walked into the room. To watch him physically change and appear and Michael Keaton to be gone, and for me to be dealing with this Beetlejuice guy…It blew my mind.”
Keaton, at least is happy with the film itself.
“I love it,” he said. “I absolutely love this thing. And I don’t [usually] talk like that. I unabashedly love this. It was not easy to pull off, and I think we did it in spades.”
