‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ star Winona Ryder thought Lydia would be ‘spinster’ rather than mom

The Lydia Deetz of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is not the Lydia Deetz that Winona Ryder always thought about.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly about the long-awaited sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988 classic, Ryder mentions where she thought her goth teen character would end up compared to the story Burton plotted for the upcoming films decades later.

“I would hope there’s that thing of wanting to keep the essence of the first one, but then imagine this whole life that’s happened,” she begins. “I never thought about Lydia ever being a mom. I thought she would just be this spinster by choice in that attic, but I think that’s where the incredible Jenna Ortega comes in. She answered a ton of those questions, and it felt so right.”

Years after teen Lydia grappled with the demon “bio-exorcist” Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), who tried to marry her as a ploy to re-enter the land of the living, Ryder’s now-adult Lydia returns in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as the host of a TV show called Ghost House. After the death of her father, Charles Deetz (played in the original film by Jeffrey Jones), she heads back to the house in Winter River with her daughter Astrid (Ortega), step-mother Delia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara), and boyfriend/TV producer Rory (Justin Theroux).

“For me, my first scenes, I’m in an art gallery,” O’Hara tells EW of her character’s place in the sequel. “Delia has a show that I’m sure her husband paid for, I don’t know. It was in a real art gallery in SoHo in London. It was a full gallery. I wish you could see every piece of that, with a program with the best bulls— art speak. All the blurbs written about each piece.”

Once back in their old haunt, a portal is accidentally opened to the AfterLife, and it’s not long before someone says that name again three times and gets Beetlejuice back in the game. Willem Dafoe also stars as Wolf Jackson, a B-list actor in life and a policeman in the AfterLife, while Monica Bellucci plays Delores, the ex-wife of Beetlejuice.

“I just remember every year or two, we’d get together. And, you know, he’d pace around and be like, ‘This isn’t like a sequel. It’s just like things happen in life, and I really want to know what’s going on with them now,'” Ryder says of Burton.

“The way Tim talks about it now, I’ve seen a couple interviews that he’s done, he talks about it being Lydia’s story. And a little girl like that in that first Beetlejuice movie, you wonder, where do they go in life? What mistakes do they make? What do they do? Where are the relationships?” O’Hara says of the director’s take on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. “He was very fascinated by that and family and the connection of the three women.”

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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opens in theaters on Sep. 6.