Tim Burton didn’t want to “tick any boxes” by re-casting Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis in the Beetlejuice sequel.
The pair played ghost couple Adam and Barbara Maitland from the original 1988 flick, but the filmmaker didn’t feel their presence was necessary for the story he wanted to tell in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which focuses on the Deetz family.
He told People Magazine: “I think the thing was for me I didn’t want to just tick any boxes. So even though they were such an amazing integral part of the first one, I was focusing on something else.”
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Adam and Barbara summoned the titular trickster ghoul, who is played by Michael Keaton, after they drowned in a river and became ghosts. They get Beetlejuice to scare away the new family that moved into their home. Charlie and Delia Deetz can’t see them, but their death-obsessed daughter Lydia can.
Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara reprise their roles as Lydia and Delia, while Jenna Ortega plays the former’s daughter Astrid Deetz.
Burton added: “A sequel like this, it really had to do with the time. That was my hook into it, the three generations of mother, daughter, granddaughter. And that [would] be the nucleus of it. I couldn’t have made this personally back in 1989 or whatever.”
Time has moved on with Lydia now a mother herself, and Ryder recently admitted she initially struggled to see Lydia move beyond her gothic phase to become a parent.
She told /Film: “I think certainly, I never pictured Lydia either having children or in any type of relationship. I just always thought she was just probably in her own world as she got older. Just sort of in the attic and happy, but alone.”
The Stranger Things actress added that as soon as she started working with Jenna and Justin Theroux — who plays Lydia’s husband Rory — on the project, she was able to get a better grasp of this new version of the character.
She explained: “I think once we got there and once Jenna and I bonded and once Justin came on board … I mean, I think everyone who’s as old as I am now, we’ve all been in those things where you’re just like, ‘What was I thinking, in terms of the relationship I have?’”
“But I don’t know with young Lydia, I don’t think she would ever have expected to be in front of a camera.”
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opens in theaters on September 6.
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