After more than 35 years, Tim Burton has finally found the secret ingredient he needs to bring Beetlejuice to life again.
While promoting Beetlejuice, which hits theaters on September 6, reprising stars Michael Keaton and Catherine O’Hara thanked Jenna Ortega for helping bring the director’s long-awaited sequel to life since they first worked together on Netflix’s Wednesday.
Noting that the actress “literally didn’t exist” when the original 1988 film was released, Keaton told Burton in USA Today , “She was born, and then we got to do something with her, and then we were like, wait a minute. Her? That? Without her, we might not be able to make this movie.”
“I had to wait for you to survive,” O’Hara joked to her 21-year-old co-star Ortega, who quipped, “The power in the room has shifted.”
In the original film, a recently deceased couple (played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) enlist the help of the titular demon (Keaton) to ward off the yuppie family that has moved in after their deaths, but when the demon meets the death-obsessed teenage member of the family, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), all hell is unleashed in their Connecticut home.
Jenna Ortega as Astrid and Winona Ryder as Lydia in Beetlejuice.
Warner Bros.
Beetlejuice In Beetlejuice, 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 reprising the role), and Beetlejuice wreaks havoc once again.
Ortega said that working with a pro like Keaton “made my job so much easier”: “When you have someone who has mold on their teeth or who’s locked in a box full of water and is trying to give you the key for the entire shoot, it’s hard not to be immersed in that world,” she explained.
Despite being born about 15 years after the original film, Ortega sensed a strong fanbase for Beetlejuice while filming in the same Vermont town as the original: “People would come up to show me photo albums with Tim’s autographs,” the actress recalls.
Ortega previously played Wednesday Addams in the spinoff of Burton’s Netflix series The Addams Family, which is set to premiere in 2022 and is currently filming season two.
