The Cast of ‘Beetlejuice’: Where Are They Now?

Tim Burton introduced the world to Beetlejuice 35 years ago. From Winona Ryder’s adventures in the Upside Down to Michael Keaton’s award-winning performance in Dopesick, here’s what the cult classic cast has been up to since

Digital News Writer, PEOPLE

Published on March 30, 2023 12:33 PM
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Michael Keaton

While Keaton had already stepped onto the Hollywood scene by the time Beetlejuice premiered, his performance as the titular undead menace solidified his spot in the limelight. Just a few months after the ’80s hit premiered, Keaton starred in the film Clean and Sober, thereby officially sinking his hook into the worlds of comedy and drama by the end of the decade.

Burton gave his Beetlejuice star another leading role with Batman in the 1989 film adaptation of the comic book and its 1992 sequel, Batman Returns. Throughout the ’90s, Keaton kept up steady appearances in films like an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown.

In more recent years, Keaton has appeared in award-winning films like the 2016 Best Picture winner, Spotlight, and 2014’s Birdman, for which he received an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe win. In 2022, Keaton won an Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG Award for his leading role in the Hulu miniseries Dopesick.

Keaton shares his only son, Sean Douglas, with his ex-wife Caroline McWilliams. While Douglas was only 4 years old when Beetlejuice premiered, he’s now a Grammy-winning songwriter and music producer. He also honored his dad with a speech at Keaton’s Hollywood Walk of Fame Star ceremony in 2016.

Alec Baldwin

For the 1988 Tim Burton classic, Baldwin took on the role of Adam — a man who, upon his death, haunts the home he once shared with his wife, Barbara, and attempts to get its new residents to leave. In short — he’s a ghost!

While Baldwin had already landed his fair share of roles before Beetlejuice, including a recurring role on Knots Landing, the movie was just the beginning of his decades-long career in TV and film.

His film roles in the years since have included Glengarry Glen Ross, The Departed and It’s Complicated. On television, his performance as Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock won the actor back-to-back Emmys in 2008 and 2009.

More recently, the actor has been navigating the fallout from the accidental shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of his upcoming film, Rust. The actor was holding the gun at the time of the accident and was later charged with involuntary manslaughter in January 2023. He has pleaded not guilty.

Baldwin shares seven children with his wife Hilaria Baldwin, whom he married in 2012. He is also father to Ireland Baldwin, whom he welcomed in 1995 with ex-wife Kim Basinger. Ireland is currently expecting her first child.

Geena Davis

As Barbara in the 1988 horror comedy, Davis played Barbara, one-half of the spectral Maitland couple haunting the Connecticut home in which they are trapped. And while she recently told PEOPLE that she would be keen to reprise her ghostly role, she’s facing one supernatural concern: “I have a feeling that ghosts don’t age,” she said in October 2022. “How would they explain that they’re older?”

The role of Barbara was just the beginning of Davis’s long list of iconic characters. Her portrayal of animal hospital employee Muriel in The Accidental Tourist — which premiered just months after Beetlejuice — won Davis the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. She earned a Best Actress nod for Thelma & Louise in 1992, but her next Academy Award win wasn’t until 2020, when she was honored with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

Davis continued gaining notoriety with 1992’s A League of Their Own and the 1994 rom-com Speechless, for which she reunited with Michael Keaton, this time as a romantic interest. On TV, the actress played the first female president in Commander in Chief, earning Emmy and SAG Award nominations and a Golden Globe win for the role.

At the time of her work on Beetlejuice, Davis was married to her second husband, Jeff Goldblum, though they split the following year. In 2002, she welcomed her first child, daughter Alizeh, with her fourth husband, plastic surgeon Reza Jarrahy (whom she divorced in 2021). The couple also share twin sons Kaiis and Kian, born in 2004.

Winona Ryder

Though Ryder’s first film role came two years prior in 1986’s Lucas, Beetlejuice was just her third onscreen credit and would prove to be a launchpad for her career that followed.

Following Beetlejuice, in which she played the teen daughter of the family who moves into Adam and Barbara’s previous home, Ryder starred in films like Heathers, Edward Scissorhands (also directed by Tim Burton,) Reality Bites, The Age of Innocence, Little Women (1994) and Girl, Interrupted.

In 2012, she returned to Burton’s world alongside her Beetlejuice costar Catherine O’Hara to lend voices to the animated flick Frankenweenie. More recently, Ryder has starred in Netflix’s smash series, Stranger Things, which will conclude with a fifth season that begins filming in June.

She has kept her love life rather private throughout the years, though has been dating Scott Mackinlay Hahn since 2011.

Catherine O’Hara

Already an established small-screen star, O’Hara didn’t make her film debut until the ’80s. She played Gail in Martin Scorcese’s 1985 crime drama After Hours and shared the screen with Meryl Streep in 1986’s Heartburn. In Tim Burton’s creepy classic Beetlejuice, O’Hara’s character Delia Deetz moved into the haunted home alongside her husband and ghost-seeing goth teen stepdaughter, Lydia.

Following her performance as Delia, Burton tapped O’Hara’s talents again for voice work on his 1993 stop-motion musical The Nightmare Before Christmas and 2012 animated film Frankenweenie. In the famed holiday classic Home Alone and its New York-based sequel, O’Hara played the famously forgetful mother of kid-left-behind Kevin McAllister.

In recent years, O’Hara played Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek (alongside her longtime friend and costar Eugene Levy). Over the course of the sitcom’s six-season run, O’Hara nabbed two SAG Awards, an Emmy and a Golden Globe (among other accolades) for her portrayal of the former soap star whose lavish life is turned upside down by her family’s loss of funds.

O’Hara met her husband, Bo Welch, on the set of Beetlejuice, where he was working as a production designer. They married in 1992 and share sons Matthew and Luke, who were born in 1994 and 1997, respectively.

Jeffrey Jones

Before starring in Beetlejuice as Charles Deetz, who moves into Barbara and Adam’s old home with his wife and daughter, Jones had roles in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Amadeus.

He continued acting through the ’90s and 2000s on film and television, including in Burton’s 1999 Sleepy Hollow, though in 2003 pleaded no contest after being accused of having a 14-year-old boy pose for sexually explicit photos, BBC reported. In 2010, the actor was sentenced to 250 hours of community service after failing to update his information on the sex offenders registry, per the outlet.

Following the arrest, Jones appeared on the series Deadwood from 2004 to 2006 as well as in its subsequent 2019 TV movie.

Glenn Shadix

Shadix got his big break playing Beetlejuice‘s Otho, the interior designer who helps the Deetz family remodel their new haunted abode. He worked with Tim Burton again in 1993, lending his voice in The Nightmare Before Christmas, and in the director’s 2001 sci-fi feature Planet of the Apes.

Before his death in 2010 at age 58, Shadix appeared on TV shows like HBO’s Carnivàle, the mythologically inspired adventure series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and on Seinfeld, playing Jerry’s landlord in season 2.