Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Officially Confirms The Death Of One Original Character

When the teaser trailer for "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" debuted last March, our reintroduction to Delia Deetz (Catherine O'Hara) and Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) was a somber one. The mother and daughter were standing graveside in a cemetery, mourning an undisclosed character. Fans of the original quickly guessed that the person being committed to the Earth was the family's patriarch, Charles Deetz (Jeffrey Jones), but Tim Burton, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, refused to confirm this suspicion. "We'll see," was all he said at the time.

Two months later, with the release of the first full theatrical trailer, this minor mystery has been solved thanks to an utterance by Jenna Ortega, who plays Lydia's rebellious teenage daughter Astrid. "I can't believe grandpa's dead." It's Charles' death, then, that serves as the catalyst for the sequel's plot, as confirmed by the following synopsis:

After an unexpected family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return home to Winter River. Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia's life is turned upside down when her rebellious teenage daughter, Astrid, discovers the mysterious model of the town in the attic and the portal to the Afterlife is accidentally opened. With trouble brewing in both realms, it's only a matter of time until someone says Beetlejuice's name three times and the mischievous demon returns to unleash his very own brand of mayhem.

Alas, what may arrive as a shock in the world of the film is, sadly, very believable in real life.

For a couple of decades, Jeffrey Jones was one of Hollywood's most distinctive character actors, capable of playing buffoons like principal Ed Rooney in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and brainy submarine designer Skip Tyler in "The Hunt for Red October." He was a welcome presence in every film lucky enough to have cast him. This changed abruptly in the fall of 2002. Aside from his portrayal of newspaper publisher A.W. Merrick in David Milch's HBO series "Deadwood" (and its 2019 film finale), Jones has barely worked at all –- and there is a sadly reasonable explanation for this.

In 2001, during a child pornography investigation targeting multiple Hollywood personalities (including Paul Reubens aka Pee Wee Herman, who was never charged with any wrongdoing), the Los Angeles Police Department arrested the "Beetlejuice" actor for possessing illicit material and coercing a 14-year-old boy into taking sexually explicit photographs (which included the child posing with stuffed animals and dressing up as an Indigenous American). Jones pled not guilty to the charge of possessing child pornography and no contest to the solicitation charge. Ultimately, Jones was sentenced to five years' probation and forced to register as a sex offender for life.

After the sentencing, Jones' attorney insisted Jones never made physical contact with the minor, and said, "[Jones] hopes at some point the public will forgive him and he can go on with his life and his career."

How did this work out for Jones?

While most of Hollywood immediately shunned Jones, "Deadwood" creator Milch threw him a lifeline in 2004 with the role of A.W. Merrick. Amazingly, Jones participated in press events for the series and spoke to reporters on the red carpet (in one brief on-camera conversation with IGN, the interviewer avoids the topic of Jones' sex offender status altogether). Jones also made a public appearance in 2006 when Milch was honored with a star on Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame.

Though Jones was unsurprisingly excellent as Merrick, he has only appeared in three films since his sentencing: "Who's Your Caddy?," "10.0 Earthquake" and Philip Kaufman's "Hemingway & Gellhorn." While Kaufman and Milch are highly respected artists, their colleagues have not been willing to take a chance on courting bad publicity by hiring Jones. He certainly hasn't made it easy on himself in the interim. He's been arrested twice for failing to update his sex offender status (first in 2004 and again in 2010). Even if these were matters of carelessness, they signal a lack of contrition from Jones –- and the last thing any filmmaker wants is to hire a registered sex offender who might be a potential recidivist.

Burton has yet to discuss Jones' absence from "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice," but what's there to say? There's not a chance a major studio like Warner Bros. would want to create any kind of controversy around this long-awaited, big-budget sequel. So Charles Deetz is dead, and, given that his last acting gig was 2019's "Deadwood: The Movie," so too is Jones's career.

"Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" opens in theaters on September 6, 2024.