‘I didn’t like horror movies at all’: Jenna Ortega accidentally discovered Beetlejuice

Tim Burton has finally admitted that his name is being called again on the big screen. Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara are back in front of the camera. And Beetlejuice Beetlejuice , out in our theaters on Wednesday, September 11th, welcomes some new additions.

Among them: Willem Dafoe, who tells us that the first opus came when he was playing at a New York theater in a production that also used Harry Belafonte’s song, which we owe “Day O” is heard in one of Beetlejuice’s most memorable scenes. From there, saying that the actor was destined to star in its sequel is just one step we took with him.

And then there’s Jenna Ortega. His career, of course, is less rich than the careers of his partners on the screen, even if he filmed it for more than a decade, but he is the star of the film, thanks to the success of Wednesday, which was directed by Tim Burton. episodes.

When he was born in September 2002, the first Beetlejuice was a full teenager when he celebrated his 14th birthday. He apparently did not witness the arrival of this phenomenon in the cinema, hence our desire to know when and how he discovered the feature film. And the answer is as surprising as it is amusing.

I sat down and watched the movie and enjoyed it, which surprised me

“I was nine or ten years old and I didn’t like horror movies at all”he tells us. “I had severe insomnia and nightmares as a kid, so they didn’t help me at all. But I was at a friend’s house who put it on the screen, around Halloween. Remember, I was too vulnerable to say anything or stop her. .”

“So I sat down and watched the movie and enjoyed it, which surprised me. It inspired me because I’d never seen anything like it before, but it was one of the first dark movies I’d seen.” However, Jenna Ortega didn’t tell us if she thanked this friend when she landed the role of Astrid Dietz in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Comments collected by Maximilien Pierret in London on 31 August 2024 – Editing by Baptiste Bertheuil