After more than 35 years, Tim Burton finally found the secret ingredient needed to bring Beetlejuice back to life once again.
While promoting Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which premieres Sept. 6 in theaters, returning stars Michael Keaton and Catherine O’Hara credited Jenna Ortega for helping the director see his long-awaited sequel to fruition after first working together on Netflix‘s Wednesday.
Noting that the actress “literally didn’t exist” yet when the original 1988 movie premiered, Keaton said to Burton for USA Today, “She gets born, you end up doing a thing with her. Then you go, wait a minute. Her? It? If she’s not around, we may never make this thing.”
“We had to wait for you to live,” O’Hara joked to their 21-year-old co-star Ortega, who quipped: “The powers have shifted in the room.”
In the original movie, a recently-deceased couple (played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) enlists the help of the titular ghoul (Keaton) to help them scare away the yuppie family that moved in after their death. But when the family’s death-obsessed teen Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) meets the mischievous spirit, all hell breaks loose on the Connecticut home.
Jenna Ortega as Astrid and Winona Ryder as Lydia in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Warner Bros.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice sees Lydia return home with her daughter Astrid (Ortega) and boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux) following the death of her father Charles (played in the original by Jeffrey Jones). The funeral reunites Lydia with her stepmother Delia (O’Hara reprising her role) as Beetlejuice returns to wreak havoc once again.
Ortega said her “job was made very easy” working with a pro like Keaton. “It’s hard not to get into the world when you have people with mold on their teeth and some guy who’s trapped in a box full of water, trying to hand you a key the whole take,” she explained.
And despite being born nearly 15 years after the original movie, Ortega got a sense of the enduring fandom for Beetlejuice when they filmed in the same Vermont town as the original. “There were people coming up showing me photo albums with Tim’s signature in them,” the actress recalled.
Ortega previously starred as Wednesday Addams in Burton’s Netflix series spin-off of The Addams Family, which premiered in 2022 and is currently filming Season 2.