Michael Keaton calls ‘Beetlejuice 2’ ‘big roll of the dice’: ‘Should we have left it alone?’

Even Beetlejuice wondered whether he should resurrect himself to the land of the living.

In a conversation with Entertainment Weekly for the video series Around the Table — dropping in full tomorrow — Michael Keaton joins some of his fellow Beetlejuice Beetlejuice cast members to talk about the sequel, which will be released in theaters Sep. 6 — 36 years after the original’s debut.

“The only thing I worried about was, should we have left it alone? You know?” Keaton says in the clip above. “Should we have just said that: ‘Don’t touch it. Just walk away. Go make your other movies,’ which we did. So, for me, it was a big roll of the dice.”

The good thing about the sequel is that it’s better in a lot of ways than the original, at least for Keaton. “This one may even be better because it’s got actually a stronger story, it kind of is emotional, the cast is stupid good,” he says. “To remake something that you didn’t even know might work the first time is really hard.”

Directed by Tim Burton, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice picks up with Winona Ryder‘s Lydia Deetz, now the host of a paranormal TV show called Ghost House and the mother of angsty teenager Astrid (Jenna Ortega). When her father, Charles, dies, three generations of Deetz women, including Lydia’s stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), return to the house in Winter River to pay their respects. Then, a portal to the Afterlife is opened accidentally, prompting someone to utter the name Beetlejuice three times and bring that pesky demon back in the game once again.

Keaton joins Ortega, Willem Dafoe (playing Afterlife policeman Wolf Jackson), Monica Bellucci (playing Beetlejuice’s demonic ex-wife Delores), and Justin Theroux (Lydia’s boyfriend and TV producer Rory) for EW’s Around the Table.

“At the end of the day, if somebody said you have to pick one thing you’ve done how I make my living, I’d probably pick Beetlejuice for its all-encompassing thing, for just its art, you know what I mean?” Keaton says of the original film, released in 1988. “I’ve been in some, you know, pretty good movies, but this [the sequel] is something different.”

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Check back tomorrow for the full conversation with the cast of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice for EW’s Around the Table.