Michael Keaton Promises That Beetlejuice Remains Debauched Sicko in Our More Enlightened Era

Worried that Tim Burton was going to sand down the perverted edges of Beetlejuice to conform to 2024 sensitivities? Don’t be, Michael Keaton told GQ, which reports “the debauched sicko will remain a debauched sicko,” in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and for all eternity.

Beetlejuice remains “a thing,” Keaton explained to the magazine. “He’s more of a thing than a he or a she, he’s more of an it. And I’m not saying ‘it’ to be politically correct. I just viewed it as a force more than anything. I mean, there’s definitely strong male energy, like stupid male energy, which I love. You don’t want to touch that because it’s not like you go, ‘Well, it’s a new year and this thing would now act like that.’”

Burton said that Keaton, like Beetlejuice, hasn’t changed in the decades between the story’s chapters. “The strange part of it is, Michael got back so into it, it was kind of scary in a way,” he explained. “I mean, for somebody who didn’t really maybe want to do it, he seemed to channel it very quickly. And so it was quite exciting and surreal.”

Both Burton and Keaton know that a little bit of debauched sicko goes a long way. In the original Beetlejuice, the titular character is only onscreen for 17 minutes. Don’t expect Keaton to take center stage in the sequel, either. “The idea was, no, no, no, you can’t load it up with Beetlejuice, that’ll kill it,” Keaton told GQ. “I think the Beetlejuice character doesn’t drive the story as much as he did in the first one. He’s more part of the storyline in this one as opposed to the first one, which is a case of, this thing comes in and drives the movie a little bit.”

In fact, Keaton told Jimmy Fallon last night that minimal screen time was the only way he’d agree to do a sequel. “I said, ‘If we ever do it, I can’t be in it more than — maybe a minute longer than I was. That’s it.” If Beetlejuice got even less screen time in the sequel, all the better, Keaton told Burton. “We can’t do more.”

Part two of the Burton/Keaton pact: Whenever possible, use practical effects instead of CGI. “They built these things,” Keaton told Fallon about the sequel’s bizarro horrorscape. “You’d be in a scene and out of the corner of your eye, literally, you’d see somebody huddled down in the corner with fishing line, you know, pulling a little cat in the corner.”

“When I say handmade, it’s literally handmade,” Keaton told GQ. 

Why is the actor so squeamish about CGI? “For the most part, I think a lot of audiences subconsciously feel farther away from what’s actually going on on the screen or in the story. It’ll work, they’ll accept it. But I think for a lot of movies, it’s not quite as enjoyable.”