NEW YORK – Watched the old “Beetlejuice” in preparation for the new sequel? You’re not the only one. So did Michael Keaton.
Keaton’s trickster demon, the Afterlife’s leading bio-exorcist and the guy who will cause unholy chaos if you say his name three times, returns in director Tim Burton’s horror comedy sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (in theaters Friday). It’s the second iconic character in as many years that Keaton has revisited after several decades – the other being Batman in last year’s DC superhero adventure “The Flash.”
Beetlejuice is different, though, because he was an original creation from the minds of Keaton and Burton, an antagonistic weirdo obsessed with marrying teenage Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) and freaking out the living and the dead alike. But as great as Keaton was playing “the ghost with the most” in the 1988 original “Beetlejuice,” he worried about having the same mojo a second time.
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“I’m so excited. Then I’m like, ‘Hold on a minute. I don’t know if I can do this again,’” says Keaton, who decided to sit down and revisit the first movie. It’s not his normal approach to movies, he adds. “I don’t want to go ‘we comedy people,’ but I hate the overanalysis of comedy or the serious breakdown. I hate to think about it. Like when I did stand-up, I liked all those people. I just didn’t want to hang around and discuss it. I want to do it.”
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Keaton says he always knew he loved the movie, but what surprised him was how big a kick he got out of it so many years later. “I immediately started laughing, like I was a fan. I even laughed at what I did. I went, ‘Oh, that’s really funny.’”
Does he have a favorite scene? “There’s so much crazy stuff in that first one, it’s hard,” Keaton says. “It’s like, who’s your favorite band? Until I’m driving home later today, 3 in the morning, I won’t know what it is.”
Keaton does love the moment when, after recently deceased couple Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) reject Beetlejuice’s serviceshe angrily kicks over a plastic tree and shouts, “Nice (expletive) model,” followed by a crotch grab. And Keaton also enjoyed filming a faux TV “ad” where Beetlejuice rides and ropes a fake cow in Western garb and sings with a drawl, “Come on down and I’ll chew on a dog!”
Keaton came up with that line on the fly doing the scene, which was inspired by the commercials of a famous Southern California car salesman named Cal Worthington that Keaton and Burton knew. “He wore a cowboy hat and he’d be like, ‘I’d eat a bug!’ ” Keaton says.
The rewatch definitely put Keaton back in the Beetlejuice groove: On the first day filming the sequel, “he shows up and, I swear, it was like demon possession. He just did it,” Burton recalls. “It was truly emotional.
“You got kind of freaked out. I mean, it was almost disturbing that he did it so quickly and so seamlessly.”
Being up close that day to Keaton’s oddball alter ego “was so amazing,” says fellow original star Catherine O’Hara. “But it wasn’t fair because he didn’t age. He was always dead.”
Adds Burton: “Just got a little moldier.”
