Why Jeffrey Jones Is Missing From Beetlejuice 2 (But Charlie Deetz Isn't)

It was Tim Burton who had the idea to make it (almost) disappear, but the reason is darker than you think.

You might think he's really dead. In Beetlejuice Beetlejuicewe learn at the beginning of the film of the sudden death of Charlie Deetz, Lydia's father (Winona Ryder), during a stop-motion animated sequence where poor Charlie survives a plane crash before being eaten by a shark… And spends the entire film in the afterlife, in the form of a headless and torsoless corpse, half-devoured, whose words spring from its bloody organs. A secondary character in the form of a running gag – and therefore, as Jeffrey Jones does not appear on screen except in the form of a photo dating from 1988, one might think that the actor has well and truly left us.

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Not so: Jeffrey Jones is very much alive. The 77-year-old actor is known for his roles in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (he was great as an overwhelmed principal) or Amadeusfelt close enough to Tim Burton's universe after the Beetlejuice original to have appeared in Ed Wood And Sleepy Hollow. But in 2002, Jeffrey Jones was arrested for forcing a 14-year-old boy to pose nude for photographs two years earlier. Sentenced to five years of probation for possession of child pornography, he has since been registered as a sex offender in California.

Which nearly ended his career: Jones has only appeared in four films since then (the golf comedy Who's Your Caddy?the earthquake nanar 10.0 Earthquake), but he was still able to appear in all three seasons of the series Deadwood (2004-2006) where he played the journalist Albert Merrick. A role he reprised in the TV movie derived from the series, released in 2019. A career that is not completely dead: rather undead, in short.

No actor is credited in the credits of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as the voice of “headless” Charlie (recall that Jones narrowly escaped death by decapitation in Sleepy Hollow, but he died anyway). Alfred Gough, one of the writers of the sequel, revealed to Entertainment Weekly that it is Tim Burton himself who gave them the idea of ​​the air crash: “The way Charlie dies in the animated sequence is Tim's nightmare. That's how he pitched it to us: 'My nightmare is being on a plane that crashes, surviving, nearly drowning, and then a shark eats me'”Gough said. “We thought it was great, and that's how we killed him.” Gough adds that Charlie's death was decided from the beginning, so that the film could focus on the three Deetz women (Catherine O'HaraRyder, and Jenna Ortega) and the way family bonds crack under the pressure of grief. Even that of a fictional character, even that of a performer who killed his career.