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Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton play the main characters in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but along with all the weird history between former goth teen Lydia and chaotic ghost Beetlejuice, they both have additional relationship baggage: Lydia’s clingy boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux), and Beetlejuice’s furiously undead ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci). io9 got a chance to talk to both Theroux and Bellucci about being the new kids in Tim Burton’s much-anticipated sequel.
“I loved the first one,” Bellucci said. “And when Tim told me there is a key role in this film [he thought of casting me for], of course I was very happy to play it. And for me, it’s such an honor to be part of this amazing cast and to enter into Tim’s fantastic, magical, poetic world.”
Later, she said that she loves Burton’s work because it “touches all generations,” and that being Italian, she appreciated Beetlejuice Beetlejuice‘s references to Italian cinema. Danny DeVito has a small but crucial role in a scene opposite Delores, and Bellucci admitted, “I love Danny. I consider him not just an amazing actor, but also he’s an Italian actor in some way, because his origin is Italian. And I think there are so many references here about Italy—Mario Bava, and Beetlejuice speaks in Italian, so we can feel that Tim really loves Italian cinema, and Italian cinema is an inspiration for him.”
Delores doesn’t have a ton of screen time, but she’s mesmerizing when you see her. “I think that Delores has a great impact … and I thought [what] was really interesting about her [is] this duality because she’s scary, but also funny. And to me, she’s a metaphor of life because we all have emotional scars and [she’s] full of scars,” Bellucci explained. “But she fights, she comes back, she’s strong. And also this role is very much about body language. So I felt a bit like a mime. I tried to play like a broken doll. And to make the scene where she puts herself together, it took two or three days to film it. I had to learn an entire choreography. And also it’s interesting to exist through your body, because we are actors and bodies are our instruments.”
For Theroux, working with Burton was also a highlight of his Beetlejuice Beetlejuice experience. “I guess there were expectations [going into making the movie], but it was sort of just hoping that it lived up to—as far as working with Tim goes, hoping that he sort of lived up to his reputation, which he certainly exceeded,” he said.
Though Theroux, who’s also a screenwriter (Iron Man 2, Tropic Thunder), had high praise for the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice script—”There are so many turns that it takes that are unexpected. It’s a script that is proof that, you know, I don’t think AI will do a good job of ever making a Tim Burton film”—he also had some freedom to improvise and shape Rory in his scenes. “My character [was] truthfully a little bit flat on the page. We kept looking for ways to make people believe that [Rory and Lydia have] a real relationship. We didn’t want it to feel like it was just a zany character that showed up. So we had to sort of develop the codependency of that relationship. And we did that. And then there were just like, things would come up on the day; we’d sort of essentially one-up each other going like, ‘I could say this,’ or ‘What about this or that?’ … But we had a lot of fun, sort of just creating sort of the weepiness of the character, the emotionality, just sort of nurturing that.”
And yes, Theroux is fully aware that Rory is going to be a character audiences love to hate. “I saw it as Lydia being this slightly broken bird who had lost her husband and [is] a single mother, and that he was fully exploiting her for commercial potential. I sort of see her as a victim in the relationship; somehow, he’s forced her to become the caregiver of him, which is sort of a tactic that can be deployed in toxic relationships.”
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in theaters now.
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