Winona Ryder on Returning for ‘Beetlejuice 2’: “One of the More Special Experiences of My Life”

The 81st Venice Film Festival has gotten off to a delightfully ghoulish start. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s hotly anticipated horror comedy sequel, received its very first press screening to a packed house Wednesday morning as the glamourous Italian festival’s opening movie.

Burton and his starry cast — featuring returning stars Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, along with Catherine O’Hara and newcomers Jenna Ortega, Willem Defoe, Justin Theroux and Monica Belluci — then swept into Venice’s press hall for their first group discussion of the making of the long-gestating project.

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“One of my favorite parts was getting to stare into your eyes again,” Ryder told Keaton when asked what it was like to reunite 36 years after making the original Beetlejuice. She said the atmosphere on set for the sequel was very similar to what she felt as a 16-year-old working with Burton and Keaton on the first film back in 1988.

“My love and trust for Tim runs so deep and there was a sense of a certain playfulness and readiness to try things,” she explained. “You feel so safe in nonsense, but you also feel just completely free.”

Summing up the whole journey of returning for the sequel, she said: “It was one of the more special experiences of my life.”

An Italian journalist noted the “feeling of happiness” that was in the air during the morning’s press screening and asked Keaton how he approached his character’s aging and evolution after more than three decades.

“I think that it’s obvious that my character has matured,” he deadpanned, slipping into a signature screwball smirk. “As suave and sensitive as he was in the first, I think he’s even more so in this one. Just his general caring nature and his sense of social mores and his political correctness.”

Added Burton: “When people ask how Beetlejuice’s character has evolved, we just start laughing.”

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice centers on Lydia Deetz (Ryder) and her family returning home to their iconic haunted house after a tragedy and then dealing with the consequences when her daughter, Astrid (Ortega), opens a portal to the afterlife where Beetlejuice resides. The film’s teaser trailer debuted in March and featured Keaton declaring to an astonished Ryder, “The juice is loose.”

Theroux said Beetlejuice “feels like it’s in our cultural DNA” and that joining the franchise felt like being “handed the keys to Willy Wonka’s house or something. He conceded that the project initially seemed “a little intimidating” but once he stepped onto the film’s “beautiful sets” it “just felt extremely playful — sort of like going into a church and then playing, you know, pick up basketball.”

He added that the project, although produced by Warner Bros., felt more like an indie film, with none of the “normal downward pressure of a studio film.”

Willem Dafoe said he has admired Burton’s work for decades and was simply excited to get the call for the project, later making it his mission to make the director laugh on set. He added that it was “actually pretty easy,” because Burton is quick to crack up.

The first reviews for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice won’t be released until later in the day in Italy after Burton and the cast walk the red carpet for the world premiere at Venice’s Sala Grande cinema. Warner Bros. Is likely feeling bullish about the movie’s commercial prospects, though, as the most recent tracking has the film opening as high as $80 million at the North American box office when it flies into theaters on Sept. 6 — which would be one of the biggest September debuts of all time, not adjusted for inflation.

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