Michael Keaton, the actor who played Beetlejuice in the 1988 hit film, recently vowed that his character in the upcoming sequel will not be altered to meet the politically correct standards of the current age. The actor maintained that he would only act in the sequel if Beetlejuice had minimal screen time, just like in the original movie.
“The idea was, no, no, no, you can’t load it up with Beetlejuice, that’ll kill it,” Keaton said during an interview with 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.”
Keaton noted that Beetlejuice identifies as an “it,” but not because of modern society’s deterioration in gender norms. “He’s a thing. 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,” the actor explained. “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.’”
Keaton expressed the pleasure of working with director Tim Burton on the remake of the classic film. “It’s the most fun I’ve had on a set in a long time. On one hand, you’d go, ‘Well, of course it’s the most fun. It looks like fun.’ As you know, it doesn’t always work like that,” he said. He also noted how fun it was to film the movie with minimal technology.
“The one thing that [Burton] and I decided on early, early, early on from the beginning, if we ever did it again, I was totally not interested in doing something where there was too much technology. It had to feel handmade. It’s the most exciting thing. When you get to do that again after years of standing in front of a giant screen, pretending somebody’s across the way from you, this is just enormous fun,” he added.
Elaborating on using special effects, Keaton touched on the consequences of overusing CGI to create movie scenes. “For the most part, [with CGI] 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.”
While Keaton has indicated that the upcoming film will not cave to today’s woke standards, other pieces of entertainment have had to learn the hard way. The American Tribune recently reported on the latest Star Wars show “The Acolyte” when it got canceled after just one season. The show ended up with a whopping 18% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes as fans blasted it for its departure from the once-great content in the Star Wars franchise.
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Featured image credit: Blair-39, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_Keaton_(NYCC_2014).JPG