One Character Is Noticeably Absent From the 'Beetlejuice' Sequel for a Very Dark Reason

Spoiler alert: This article contains minor spoilers for Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.

The scariest thing about Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice actually has nothing to do with Michael Keaton’s titular character. Jeffrey Jones, who played Charles Deetz, is noticeably absent. He’s not only absent, but his character’s death is the impetus for the sequel’s plot.

After Charles Deetz survives a plane crash but is then killed by a shark, Lydia (Winona Ryder) and her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) go to the old Beetlejuice house to mourn with Lydia’s stepmom, Delia (Catherine O’Hara). Naturally, antics come into play as the three women explore the afterlife with Beetlejuice, which includes Charles. But Jeffrey is still not in the sequel even though Charles is — why is that?

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice relies on Charles’s death to tell its story. And because it’s in the Beetlejuice universe, the afterlife is on full display to explore. However, working with Jeffrey was off the table after he had some legal troubles (more on this later), so the creators had to figure out how to kill him off creatively.

As Delia tells Lydia how Charles died, an animated sequence shows the series of events. "The way Charles dies in that animated piece is [director Tim Burton's] nightmare of dying,” screenwriter Alfred Gough told Entertainment Weekly. “He literally pitched that: 'My nightmare is, I'm in a plane crash, I survive the plane crash, I almost drown, and then a shark eats me.’ We were like, 'Well, that's genius. So that's going to be how he dies.'"

It worked especially well for Charles to die this way because the shark bit his head off. This meant that any actor could portray Charles in the Beetlejuice sequel without having to revisit Jeffrey. And the real reason Jeffrey isn’t in the sequel is darker than Beetlejuice itself.

While Jeffrey seemed to be the quintessential dad in Beetlejuice, his reality was very different. In 2002, he was arrested on an indictment for “a felony charge of using a minor for sex acts and a misdemeanor count of possessing child pornography,” according to EW. He pleaded no contest to the charges and took a plea deal, which included five years of probation, counseling, and registering as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

The incident at hand was that he allegedly hired a 14-year-old to “pose for lewd snapshots.” After the hearing, he said, “This concludes a really painful chapter in my life. I am sorry that this incident was allowed to occur. Such an event has never happened before and it will never happen again.” Even still, he was arrested twice more in 2004 and 2010 for failing to update his status in the sex offender registry, according to BBC News.

He has still acted in a couple of movies since, in Deadwood: The Movie, and My Brothers’ Crossing. But the Beetlejuice producers understandably did not want to work with Jeffrey again after the incidents, so they instead used his absence as a way to propel the story of the long-awaited Beetlejuice sequel.