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Beetlejuice fans knew—even before it was heavily hinted at in the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice trailers—that there was no way Jeffrey Jones’ version of Charles Deetz would appear in the sequel. But the character couldn’t just vanish from the story entirely. Figuring out how to frame Charles required some maneuvering by screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who talked about their approach in a new interview.
If you still haven’t seen the movie yet…
In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Charles’ sudden death happens at the start of the movie; his funeral is the reason his wife Delia (Catherine O’Hara), his daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder), and Lydia’s daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) return to that iconic white house in Winter River, Connecticut. His demise is carefully explained in a way that’s both true to the Beetlejuice world’s playfully macabre aesthetic—and in a way that means Jones, a registered sex offender, never actually appears onscreen: through stop-motion animation.
Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter, Gough credited director Tim Burton with dreaming up Charles’ comically drawn-out death scene. “The animated story of how Charles died is from Tim telling his worst nightmare of dying, which is he’s in a plane crash, he survives, he almost drowns, he’s about to be saved and then he’s eaten by a shark,” the writer explained. “That’s a great story. Because [in] the first movie there is stop motion—remember when the sculptures come to life and there’s those things—we wanted to have that in there. So it became about putting a twist on the backstory exposition moments … for Charles, showing him with his head off helps with the real-life situation.”
Later in the movie, Delia—in a deep grief over losing her beloved Charles—accidentally dies while performing a snake-involved ritual over his grave. (It’s tied into her evolution from sculptor to video and performance artist, something Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has a lot of fun with.) If Delia’s death seemed surprising, it wasn’t to the much-loved comedic actor who plays her.
“That was actually Catherine’s idea,” Millar revealed to THR. “We were talking about her character, and she said, ‘I think she should commit suicide just because she’s so in love with Charles. The ultimate thing she can do is to join him in the afterlife.’ It’s a great idea, but it felt like a weird well to go down in a comedy to have a main character commit suicide toward the end of the movie. What’s a more creative, bizarre way that she could die? That was an accidental death. So we got to his idea of the asps, which we really loved.”
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in theaters now.
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