Michael Keaton found the "merchandising" of Beetlejuice "off-putting"

Beetlejuice might have some of the most recognizable characters and distinctive aesthetics of the ’80s, but Michael Keaton didn’t set out to make some sort of two-dimensional recurring Saturday Night Live character. He created the character of Betelgeuse for the love of the art, man. Betelgeuse was comic but also awful, a true whirling dervish of a ghoul, and now he’s a Halloween costume. It’s pretty cool to embody something so enduring and iconic, but it also presented challenges when Keaton returned to film the sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which premieres September 6.

“There’s been so much merchandising of it, I had to drop back to where it started,” Keaton tells Empire magazine in a new profile for the film. “I had to go, ‘What was my unusual imagination even thinking about when I was developing it in the first place?’ As opposed to seeing a coffee mug or a golf-club cover [adorned with Betelgeuse’s face].” Moving past the pop culture idea of Betelgeuse “was fucking weird,” the actor admits. “To be honest with you—I’m being very frank—it was off-putting, to look and go, ‘I don’t want to look like all these little things, fuck that—what was the thing that started this?’”

Perhaps the idea that the weird world of Beetlejuice had become so commercialized is why Keaton resisted making a sequel for so long. Director Tim Burton previously said his star “had no burning desire to do” a sequel “unless it felt right,” so obviously, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice felt pretty right to him. Burton told Entertainment Weekly the “back-to-basics, handmade quality” of the movie reenergized his own love of filmmaking, and Keaton “just got back into it. It was kind of scary for somebody who was maybe not that overly interested in doing it. It was such a beautiful thing for me to see all the cast, but he, sort of like demon possession, just went right back into it.”

Now, Keaton is the biggest cheerleader for the sequel, which also stars Winona Rider, Catherine O’Hara, and Jenna Ortega. He’s been raving about it for a while, and continues to do so in his interview with Empire. “I love it,” he gushes. “I absolutely love this thing. And I don’t [usually] talk like that. I unabashedly love this. It was not easy to pull off, and I think we did it in spades.”