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Jenna Ortega Thought She Was ‘Disassociating’ Seeing Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice: ‘I Had to Stare at My Hands’

Ortega shared how Keaton's makeup caused her to disassociate, forcing her to 'stare at her hands' to make sure she was real.

Leading the Netflix series “Wednesday,” Ortega got a crash course in Burton’s one-of-a-kind approach to storytelling and the unreal worlds he drops his players into, but she was truly put to the test on the set of his latest feature, the upcoming legacy sequel “ Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Speaking with Fandango for a recent interview, Ortega explained how a Burton set, in particular this one, which had so much history on it, often breeds a sense of community, and how her first experience seeing Michael Keaton in hair and makeup as Beetlejuice set the tone for the rest of the shoot. “It was actually quite intimidating, because I’ve been saying that it was the first time that I felt like I really didn’t recognize somebody,” Ortega said, “and I think also it was strange because [his] hair and makeup, everything, [he] looked the exact same, so it was really confusing mentally to be in that place. “Obviously joining a sequel to something and it being so long since the original, I think I just wanted to put my head down and do the work and show up and be respectful and read my little book book off to the side,” said Ortega, “but I think Winona was so warm and so welcoming, as was Catherine [O’Hara], as was everybody else, that you almost didn’t have a choice but to become a part of the family, which I’m so grateful for because I think that in shooting and working together and Tim’s playful spirit, I felt like everything that we were doing felt like we were all in on the same joke or on the same page or had the same ideas.

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