Charles Deetz ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ fate inspired by Tim Burton’s nightmare (exclusive)

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Charles Deetz, the patriarch of the Deetz family and a key character from the original Beetlejuice, is gone in the sequel but definitely not forgotten.

Director Tim Burton made it common knowledge that Charles would not be alive during the events of the sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. He would especially not be played by Jeffrey Jones, who retreated from the public eye after his initial arrest in 2002 for possession of child pornography and registering as a sex offender after pleading no contest to soliciting a 14-year-old boy to pose for sexually explicit photos. But the film, playing now in theaters, still has a place for the character.

Screenwriter Alfred Gough, who penned the screenplay with longtime writing partner Miles Millar, tells Entertainment Weekly that Charles’ fate in the film was actually inspired by Burton’s worst nightmare.

The whole premise of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice stems from Charles’ death, which prompts his wife Delia (Catherine O’Hara), his daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder), and his teenage granddaughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) to return to the fictional town of Winter River, Conn., where the ghostly shenanigans all began. Delia is the one who must tell her stepdaughter how he died, and the audience sees it all dramatized in a stop-motion animated sequence.

Charles was in a plane crash, and just when he thought he survived, a shark arrived to bite him in half. A stand-in portrays the ghost of a half-eaten, now-headless Charles, brought to life with practical make-up and costume effects, in the new scenes set in the Afterlife. The voice was added in during post-production and no actor credit is listed for Charles.

“The way Charles dies in that animated piece is Tim’s nightmare of dying. He literally pitched that: ‘My nightmare is, I’m in a plane crash, I survive the plane crash, I almost drown, and then a shark eats me,'” Gough tells EW. “We were like, ‘Well, that’s genius. So that’s going to be how he dies.'”

According to Gough, who worked with Burton and Millar on Netflix’s Wednesday series, the filmmaker wanted Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to focus on the three characters of Lydia, Delia, and Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). “Charles dying was the impetus for doing it,” the scribe says. “Then what happens when Charles dies?” he adds. “Because, as you know, when you have these moments of family crisis, I think everybody likes to believe a family gets stronger. A family doesn’t. Whatever fissures are in your family, in a way, get magnified. So it was just the idea of having these three generations of women under one roof in this very intense situation and how they’re dealing with it and the forces that come with that.”

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Gough also spoke with EW about his discussions with Burton and Millar about whether to include the Maitlands, Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis), in the new movie. “There was a version [of the script] where they just showed up at the end, but the problem is they’re ghosts. So they kind of needed to look like they were 35, which was never going to happen,” he said. “I think Tim felt, and Miles and I agreed, that their story had been told. So how do we move on from that?”