Michael Keaton Reveals His One Condition for a ‘Beetlejuice’ Sequel

Actor Michael Keaton has recently stepped back into one of his most memorable roles, Beetlejuice, for a highly anticipated sequel that has been over two decades in the making. However, Keaton had specific conditions that needed to be met before he would agree to reprise the character.

Tim Burton’s 2024 sequel to Beetlejuice, titled Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, brings Keaton back alongside familiar faces like Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara. The new film also introduces newcomers, including Jenna Ortega.

Talks of a second Beetlejuice movie have been swirling since the original was released. At one point, Burton was hesitant about making a sequel, unsure if he could recapture the magic of the first film.

“I mean, I’ve often resisted re-visiting. Like in the case of Nightmare and Beetlejuice, they asked me to do sequels and I just said no… I wanted to keep the integrity of those particular things. Those movies were special to me,” Burton once told Games Radar.

Keaton, too, was at a stage in his career where he scrutinized his film choices carefully. During an interview with the BBC, he explained why he took an extended hiatus from the movie industry.

“I reached a point where I didn’t think I was that great. I’m not being humble. I was looking at things and thinking, ‘You’re really not that good in that.’ I think I was becoming boring as well as bored,” he said. “It was nobody’s fault except mine, probably, and it might not even be my fault. Also, I would get scripts and think, ‘What’s the point of this?’ I turned an awful lot of things down. That can sound very elitist, but the truth is 70 percent of the stuff just wasn’t very good. The other thing is that I wasn’t getting really great stuff. So it was a combination of wanting to really go back to work again and very quietly and slowly and methodically start to plot a course where I would start to get what I wanted.”

This careful consideration extended to the idea of doing sequels.

“I don’t necessarily say, ‘I don’t do sequels.’ I did a sequel once, and I wouldn’t necessarily not do a sequel. The idea doesn’t thrill me, but I would do a sequel if it was the right thing,” he said.

Keaton applied this same criteria to Beetlejuice.

“But Beetlejuice is very, very special. The only way I would do it is if it could be in that ballpark – in the same zone of creativity as the first one,” Keaton said. “Otherwise, I’d want to leave that alone, I think. I just enjoyed it so much because it’s the only thing I’ve done – except maybe Much Ado About Nothing – that comes closest to purely original, authentic art on the screen that I’ve done. That’s a rush, when you get that, and you want to do it again, you know, but you don’t want to screw up.”

It appeared that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice met these conditions for Keaton. According to Burton, the actor didn’t miss a beat after putting back on his zebra-striped suit, making it feel as though no time had passed.

“We didn’t rehearse, we didn’t do anything, right? He comes on, and it was truly like demon possession,” Burton shared with Screen Rant about Keaton. “It felt like a time warp. You’re right, it was unnerving. It was great, and it was exciting, but it was really also disturbing.”

Burton also elaborated on his decision to revisit the world of Beetlejuice 35 years after the original film.

“It’s been asked from the very beginning, but nothing clicked. And truly, it couldn’t have happened until now. It was only fairly recently, because of all this talk, I just put all the noise away,” Burton said. “I just go, ‘Okay, I love the Lydia character.’ That was the character that I connected with, this kind of teenager that I remember being. So I go like, ‘Well, what happened to this person 35 years later?’ What a weird thing, you go from cool teenager to some kind of f***ed up adult or whatever. And what relationships do you have when you have kids? What’s your relationship with that?”

“It’s not something I could have done back then. It’s only something you could do once you’ve experienced those things yourself. For me, it became a very personal movie; kind of a weird family movie,” he added.

Source: Games Radar, BBC, Screen Rant