NEW YORK – Did you watch the old “Beetlejuice” to prepare for the new sequel? You’re not the only one. Michael Keaton did that, too.
Keaton’s trickster demon, the afterlife’s premier bio-exorcist and the guy who wreaks unholy havoc 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 was Batman in last year’s DC superhero adventure “The Flash.”
Beetlejuice is different, however, because he’s an original creation from the minds of Keaton and Burton, an antagonistic weirdo obsessed with marrying teenager Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) and freaking out the living and the dead alike. But as great as Keaton was in the role of the “ghost with the most” in the original 1988 Beetlejuice, he worried about whether he’d have the same spell a second time around.
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“I get so excited. Then I think, ‘Wait a minute. I don’t know if I can do this again,'” says Keaton, who decided to sit down and watch the first film again. It’s not his normal approach to movies, he adds. “I don’t want to say ‘we comedy people,’ but I hate the overanalysis of comedy or the serious breakdown. I hate thinking about it. When I was doing stand-up, I liked all those people. I just didn’t want to hang around and discuss it. I want to do it.”
Keaton says he always knew he loved the film, but what surprised him was how much fun he had with it so many years later. “I immediately started laughing like I was a fan. I even laughed at what I had done. I thought, ‘Oh, this is really funny.'”
Does he have a favorite scene? “There’s so much crazy stuff in the first scene, it’s hard,” says Keaton. “It’s like asking, ‘What’s your favorite band?’ Until I drive home later today at 3 a.m., I won’t know what it is.”
Keaton loves the moment when recently deceased couple Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) refuse Beetlejuice’s services, he angrily kicks over a plastic tree and shouts “Nice (expletive) model,” whereupon he grabs his crotch. And Keaton also had fun making a fake TV “commercial” in which Beetlejuice, dressed in western clothes, rides a fake cow and lassoes it, singing in a drawling voice, “Come down and I’ll chew a dog!”
Keaton came up with the line spontaneously while filming the scene. It was inspired by commercials for a famous Southern California car salesman named Cal Worthington, whom Keaton and Burton knew. “He wore a cowboy hat and would always say something like, ‘I’d eat a bug!'” Keaton says.
Rewatching it definitely put Keaton back in the Beetlejuice mood: On the first day of shooting the sequel, “he showed up and, I swear, it was like demonic possession. He just did it,” Burton recalls. “It was really emotional.”
“It was kind of mind-boggling. I mean, it was almost disturbing that he did it so quickly and so smoothly.”
Being so close to Keaton’s twisted alter ego that day “was just incredible,” says Catherine O’Hara, also from the original film. “But it was unfair, because he didn’t age. He was always dead.”
Burton adds: “It’s just gotten a little moldier.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ star Michael Keaton picks favorite scenes
