Jeffrey Jones' face might be in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but the rest of him isn't
A rep for the Beetlejuice and Ferris Bueller actor, who was forced to register as a sex offender in 2003, confirmed that Jones does not appear in the film
Among the various details that cropped up in the recent teaser trailer for Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—the hilariously un-subtle music choices, the genuine coolness of seeing Michael Keaton back in one of his most famous parts, the general radiance of Catherine O’Hara—one small element from the trailer caught a lot of eyes: An extremely quick glimpse of the face of Jeffrey Jones, one of the stars of the original film, peeking ever-so-slightly out from an avant-garde headstone. (Crafted by his weirdo artist widow Delia, we can only assume.)
Given that the Beetlejuice movies are about, well, ghosts, the trailer’s focus on the funeral of Charles Deetz raised a few questions, most notably about whether Jones would be appearing in the movie—an assertion that a representative for the actor has now shot down, telling The Hollywood Reporter that Jones is absolutely not in the film.
Which isn’t wholly surprising, in so far as, sure, “dead” only goes so far in the world of the Afterlife… But, well, there’s “dead,” and then there’s “registered sex offender” dead, yeah? With the exception of his casting on David Milch’s Deadwood in 2004 (and then his much more limited reappearance in its film sequel in 2019) Jones’ career functionally ended in 2003, when he was forced to register as a sex offender after pleading no contest to charges of soliciting a 14-year-old boy to take nude photographs. Not even his long association with Burton—besides Beetlejuice, he also appeared in 1994's Ed Wood and 1999's Sleepy Hollow—seems to have been able to paper over something like that, and so Jones won’t be appearing in the sequel (despite the surprise appearance of a brief shot of his face in the trailer).