This Original ‘Beetlejuice’ Star Won’t Return For Sequel

Among the original Beetlejuice cast members was Jeffrey Jones, who played Winona Ryder’s on-screen dad, Charles Deetz, alongside Catherine O’Hara’s Delia Deetz as his wife. Jones’s last film appearance was in 2019’s Deadwood: The Movie. However, before then, he starred in hits like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Amadeus, Ed Wood, and Sleepy Hollow.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Jones will not star in the Beetlejuice 2024 sequel, even though the movie trailer featured a headstone of his character, Charles. At the funeral were O’Hara’s Delia, Ryder’s Lydia, and a new addition to the classic, Jenna Ortega, who plays Lydia’s teenage daughter, Astrid.

Why won’t Jeffrey Jones return for ‘Beetlejuice’ sequel?

Jones played big-city real estate developer Charles in the 1988 original and buys a home in Connecticut following a fatal car accident involving the house owners, the Maitlands, played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis. The Maitland ghosts are bewildered as they watch their old-fashioned house become a postmodern funhouse when the Deetzes move in.

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Although there is no outright confirmation of Jones’s absence from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the glimpse of the tombstone means he is either gone or participates in the afterlife— since the sequel shows the Maitlands’ misadventures in time after death. Joining the former cast are new characters played by Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux, Willem Dafoe, and Monica Bellucci.

In 2003, things got messy for Jones after he pleaded no contest to producing child pornography and was sentenced to five years probation after failing to update his sex offender status. The New York-born actor, who is a SAG awards and Golden Globes nominee, was absent from the spotlight for years until his uncredited cameo as Collier’s editor Charles Colebaugh in the 2012 HBO original Hemingway & Gellhorn.

Although his charge for possession of child pornography was dropped after his attorney claimed there was improper physical contact, Jones was arrested twice in Florida and California and did an additional three probationary years plus 250 hours of community service. He was also listed on the California Department of Justice’s national sex offender database in 2021.