When it came to keeping OG Beetlejuice fans happy with the sequel, lead hair and makeup artist Christine Blundell knew the key started with Winona Ryder’s Lydia.
“My job really was to prep everything so I had every version of what we could do with Lydia’s character further down the line,” Blundell exclusively told Us Weekly about prepping for the film. “And once Winona started, we played about a few different looks and kind of worked out that we had to give a nod to that fringe. I think I’d have been literally blasted by the fans if she didn’t still have an essence of grown-up goth about her. So we definitely decided to sort of stay in that area.”
When it came to Lydia’s makeup, Blundell said she and the team aimed to make it look as if it had always been applied a “few hours before” to give a more authentic feel to the character. “Her life is too mad to keep going in and making her look precise, and she didn’t want to look pristine,” she added.
For Blundell, it was important for her department to be “respectful” to the original 1988 cult classic while also finding their “own” style more than 30 years later. Each decision, she said, was a “collaboration” between herself, the actors and director Tim Burton, who was “very specific” about what he envisioned for the characters.
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That included Michael Keaton’s titular character, a ghost who had to look ageless, despite the decades between movies. And although Beetlejuice’s overall appearance stayed fairly similar to the original, Blundell and her team still went through “weeks” of trying “different samples of how [his look] should be.”
“I got all of [Michael’s] stuff prepped and before he came in, we’d had a body double,” Blundell shared. “We were just literally working out how we bring back his character with our own version. But it looked as close as what it did originally. Then he arrived and kind of fine-tuned the last little bits. “
While Keaton doesn’t sport too many prosthetics as Beetlejuice — just a “fake nose” and “teeth,” Blundell said — there was a very specific preparation process to getting him “caked” in the character’s signature makeup. “[It] is literally a proper grease paint,” Bundall confessed.
Catherine O’Hara, meanwhile, had six custom wigs prepared in a “light copper color” by an in-house wig maker. However, Blundall told Us that the Emmy winner was all in when it came to returning to Delia’s original red hair, which ultimately led to a “whole night coloring these wigs up to the vivid red and cutting them into styles.”
One actress who didn’t need a lot of prep work was Jenna Ortega, who portrays Lydia’s daughter, Astrid. Blundell said that the character needed to look as if she “just wasn’t wearing any” makeup — and luckily, Ortega had the perfect complexion to make it work.
“Jenna, to be honest, you could have her not wearing anything and that’s pretty much what we did,” Blundell confessed, noting that the character is meant to look as unbothered as possible. “She wore the tiniest little bit of concealer should she need it. But other than that, it was all about a bit of lip balm and coming in for a cup of tea in the morning and having a chat really putting up her hair as scruffy as we could do it.”
It was imperative, Blundell said, to provide a distinct difference between Astrid and her mom.
“What we wanted with Jenna’s character was very different to the Lydia child because she could see the dead people and she was never against it,” Blundell explained. “Whereas Jenna’s character was kind of almost, like, ‘Mum, you’re being daft, I don’t believe you.’ As their characters were, they were very different children growing up. Jenna’s character was very anti what her mum was about and didn’t believe in [the] afterlife at all.”
Despite Blundell’s clear vision for the film, she was not involved in the original — and the job came as a welcomed surprise at just the right time. The hair and makeup artist told Us that she was on a “much needed” holiday in Sri Lanka when she got a phone call about an “availability check for Tim Burton.”
“And I’m just like, ‘Oh, OK.’ And so then cut to me running around this sort of retreat in Sri Lanka trying to find reception so I could do a Zoom call,” she quipped, adding that she spent the rest of her vacation “excited” about the fact that she might get to recreate a film she is “such a fan” of.
“When I first sort of had a proper sit down chat with Tim, he said to me, ‘We want keep everything as practical and as close to without using CGI as possible’. So he said my biggest note is ‘I just need you to have fun,’” Blundell recalled. “And I was just like, ‘Got it.’”
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Blundell then met up with the movie’s prosthetic supervisor, Neal Scanlan, and the duo promised each other they would do what they could to make the best sequel possible. Luckily for them, everyone else on the project seemed to have the same idea.
“We both made a pact that we were working very closely together and to make sure that we’d help each other as much as we definitely could,” she said. “There were no egos in this film at all. Everybody was just there to pull off Tim’s vision, really.”
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is now playing in theaters.
