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Tim Burton has explained why actors Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis aren’t in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the long-awaited sequel to the 1988 original.
The film follows Michael Keaton reprising his role as the titular bio-exorcist, as he taunts the Deetz family. Lydia is once again played by Winona Ryder, with her mother and artist Delia played by Schitt’s Creek star Catherine O’Hara.
Although the forthcoming movie features a slew of new characters played by actors including Monica Belluci as Beetlejuice’s wife, Willem Dafoe as sinister character Wolf Jackson, and Justin Theroux as Rory, many pointed out that two of the original film’s main stars are absent.
Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin play Barbara and Adam Maitland, a couple who are abruptly killed in a car crash and find themselves haunting their own home in Beetlejuice. At the end of the original film, they learn to coexist with the Deetz family.
Burton explained why the pair are absent in the new film, in an interview with People.
“I think the thing was for me I didn’t want to just tick any boxes,” the director said. “So even though they were such an amazing integral part of the first one, I was focusing on something else.”
He continued, “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.”
The sequel also explains how the couple who were restricted to their former home, find a “loophole” that allows them to finally leave.
In April earlier this year, Davis confirmed she wouldn’t be in the film as she told Entertainment Tonight, “I‘m not in the remake. Oh, you were expecting that I would be? Yeah, no, you know what? Because my theory is that ghosts don’t age... Not that I have.”
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Davis, who won the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in Thelma & Louise in 1992, said at the time that she’d not seen the trailer for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
“Somebody said they were crying, so I have to see the trailer,” she said of the clip which was released in September 2023.
