After more than 35 years, Tim Burton finally found the secret ingredient needed to Beetle juice back to life.

While I promote Beetlejuice Beetlejuicewhich premieres in theaters on September 6, with returning stars Michael Keaton and Catherine O’Hara praising Jenna Ortega for helping the director bring his long-awaited sequel to life after first working together on the Netflix series Wednesday.

Keaton noted that the actress “literally didn’t exist” when the original 1988 film premiered, telling Burton that he Today in the US“She’s born, you end up doing one thing with her. Then you go, wait a minute. Her? It? If she’s not here, we might never make this thing.”

“We had to wait for you to live,” O’Hara joked to their 21-year-old co-star Ortega, who in turn said, “The powers in the room have shifted.”

In the original film, a recently deceased couple (played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) enlist the titular ghoul (Keaton) to help them chase away the yuppie family that moved in after their deaths. But when the family’s death-obsessed teenager, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), encounters the mischievous spirit, all hell breaks loose in the Connecticut home.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Lydia returns home with her daughter Astrid (Ortega) and boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux) after the death of her father Charles (played by Jeffrey Jones in the original). The funeral reunites Lydia with her stepmother Delia (O’Hara reprising her role) while Beetlejuice returns to cause new chaos.

Ortega said her “job was made very easy” by working with a professional like Keaton. “It’s hard not to go out into the world when you have people with mold on their teeth and a guy who’s stuck in a box full of water and he’s trying to give you a key all the time,” she explained.

And despite being born nearly 15 years after the original film, Ortega got a sense of the enduring fandom for Beetle juice when they filmed in the same Vermont town as the original. “People would come up to me and show me photo albums with Tim’s autograph in them,” the actress recalled.

Ortega previously played the role of Wednesday Addams in Burton’s Netflix series spin-off The Addams Familywhich premiered in 2022 and is currently filming season 2.