‘Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!’: Michael Keaton tells us why it was finally time to bring back his iconic character

Michael Keaton turns 73 on Sept. 5, the day before “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” the long-awaited sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988 horror comedy “Beetlejuice,” opens in theatres.
Yet the Oscar-nominated actor is like a toddler compared to his title character, a wild-haired and mischievous spirit in a skunk-striped suit who is centuries old and literally looks like death warmed over — because he is.
Still, Keaton admits he’s done a lot more thinking about life, aging and mortality since he starred in the first “Beetlejuice” in his mid-30s, playing an old ghost teaching new ghosts how to scare pesky humans.
“If I stand on my tiptoes sometimes, I can start to see a little bit over the hill,” Keaton said in an interview from New York, punctuating his poetic turn of phrase with a chuckle.
“I go, OK, I’m uncomfortably close to what I’m seeing over there. So, you know, time is everything to me. Time is the valuable commodity.”
Valuable enough that he decided it was the now-or-never moment to revisit some beloved characters from his decades-long career. First it was the caped crusader from the Burton-directed “Batman” (1989) and “Batman Returns” (1992).
Keaton’s recent return as the night-prowling crimebuster for “The Flash” and “Batgirl” was less than a roaring success: the former film bombed, and the latter, controversially, was shelved by the studio. You won’t catch Keaton complaining about it. He’s been joking recently that the pay cheques for his Batman reappearances more than made up for any box office blues or artistic funk he may have felt about a role he’s always been ambivalent toward.
“The truth, and I didn’t say this for decades but now I talk about it, is that it was never about Batman for me. It was driven by Bruce Wayne, the person who creates this Batman character. That was really the key.
“That was my own personal thing and how I approached it. Everybody always talks about Batman, but I always think to myself, quietly and privately, you don’t get it, it’s not about him.”
Keaton is expecting a much better response to “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” and so is the movie industry.
Box office predictions suggest a North American theatrical opening north of $80 million(U.S.), which would be 10 times the debut weekend take of the original film.
Despite the pent-up audience demand to see Beetlejuice (or Betelgeuse, as he’s formally known), Keaton and Burton were determined not to make the mistake of putting a lot more of the character in the sequel. The first “Beetlejuice” contained barely 17 minutes of him, making Keaton more of an ensemble player than a lead actor.
Which was fine by him. Having Beetlejuice be more of a spice than the main course meant the audience wouldn’t have time to get bored with him.
Maintaining this philosophy for the sequel meant a lot of room for returning and new characters played by Catherine O’Hara, Winona Ryder, Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Justin Theroux and Monica Bellucci to flex their comedic and dramatic muscles, in a story about living, dying and grieving that is deeper and more poignant than the original. It’s once again set in the fictional small town of Winter River, Conn., but parts are also in the fantastic realm of the Afterlife.
“Sequels are really hard to pull off and many people continually make the same types of mistakes,” Keaton said.
“If there are wonderful action scenes with a lot of car crashes, they say, ‘Let’s give them more car crashes!’ Studios often don’t realize that it throws off the recipe, it throws off the formula. One of the things Tim and I agreed on before we started, if we were ever to do (Beetlejuice) again, was if there’s any more of the character in the movie, it has to be minimal, timewise. And so the storyline is stronger, with more depth and more dimension.”
Keaton felt this way even though Beetlejuice is his favourite of the many fascinating characters he’s played in his career, a long list of figures both imaginary and real.
He played an avian-obsessed thespian in “Birdman,” and a real-life investigative newspaperman in “Spotlight,” both of which won best picture Oscars. (Keaton was nominated for best actor for “Birdman,” his sole Oscar nod to date, but he won a best actor Emmy for playing a drug-addicted doctor in the 2022 series “Dopesick.”)
The versatile Keaton has also played McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc in “The Founder” (2016) and provided the voice for the Ken doll in “Toy Story 3” (2010). He’s even played multiple cloned versions of a character, in the sci-fi comedy “Multiplicity” (1996).
Given his status in the industry and his fondness for playing Beetlejuice, it seems incredible that Keaton would want to see less of himself on the screen. Imagine Johnny Depp opting to keep Capt. Jack Sparrow’s screen time to a minimum in a “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie.
That’s how Keaton rolls, though.
“Filmmaking is the ultimate team sport, you know? It doesn’t work and can’t work any other way. That’s how I look at it.
“I’ve played lead characters and I’ve played in films that are ensemble movies. It doesn’t matter to me. It’s all dependent upon what the point of view is, what the script is and what the story is. The cast (of ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’) is as great as the last one, equal to that if not better. Everyone is so damned good and funny.”
Director Burton praises Keaton’s collegial spirit.
“He’s got such an energy and such an interesting take,” Burton said in press notes for the film.
“It’s kind of like working with a prize fighter: ‘OK, let’s try to do this and that.’ But he’s very clever, very funny and very good. You get something back when you work with people like him.”
This raises the question: What does Keaton get back from playing a character like Beetlejuice?
Keaton pauses for a moment to reflect.
“It just gives me the opportunity to be wildly imaginative, creative, and essentially do what I’ve kind of wanted to do when I started doing this, in its purest form,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah — that’s the best place to be.”