Michael Keaton has some great news for “Beetlejuice” fans. During a recent interview on SiriusXM’s “The Jess Cagle Show,” the actor said he has watched a first cut of Tim Burton’s upcoming sequel, officially titled “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” and he has nothing but raves for it.
“I’ve seen it now. I’m going to see it again after a couple of little tweaks in the editing room, and I confidently say this thing is great,” Keaton said. “The [original] was so fun and exciting visually. [The sequel is] all that but really beautiful and interestingly emotional here and there. I wasn’t ready for that. It’s great.”
The “Beetlejuice” sequel reunites Keaton with Burton and original cast members Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara. Newcomers include Jenna Ortega and Willem Dafoe. Plot details are not yet known, but Ortega confirmed last month that she is starring as the daughter of Ryder’s Lydia Deetz.
“She’s weird, but in a different way and not in the way you’d assume, I would say,” Ortega told Vanity Fair about the character. “The relationship between Lydia and Astrid, my character, is very important. And it’s also really strange because it’s a lot of catching up and putting the pieces together of what’s gone on in Lydia’s life since, which is nice, I think, for anybody who loves the character and is excited to see her again.”
Perhaps this mother-daughter angle to “Beetlejuice Beetljuice” provides an emotional catharsis to the story that Keaton wasn’t expecting. Keaton said during the “Jess Cagle” interview that he had only seen the original “Beetlejuice” once or twice from start to finish before he decided to rewatch it ahead of production on the sequel.
“It’s like a piece of art, you know what I mean? It’s almost like you want to take it and put it in a museum,” Keaton said of the original. “There’s just nothing like it. To do it again was a little, I guess intimidating, and I was nervous about it. I wanted to do it a long time ago. I thought maybe we should take another shot at it, and then the idea went away and no one seemed excited about it. Then it started coming back and I got excited.”
Keaton told People magazine last month 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.”
Watch Keaton’s full interview on “The Jess Cagle Show” in the video below. Warner Bros. is set to release “Beetlejuice 2” in theaters on Sept. 6.
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