Costumer Calls Beetlejuice 'Dirtier and Older' in Sequel and Details Dressing Michael Keaton's Return (Exclusive)

For the past 36 years, Beetlejuice has toiled underground.

At least that’s what Beetlejuice Beetlejuice costume designer Colleen Atwood assumes it worked.

The title character, played by Michael Keaton in the 1988 film and its sequel, released on September 6, terrified audiences in the ’80s in his iconic grungy black and white striped suit. The character terrorized the Maitlands and the Deetzes — and in the sequel, Atwood had to decide how to approach updating that iconic suit, or whether she wanted to update it at all.

Her first step was to find out who Beetlejuice was now.

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“He’s an older, gentler Beetlejuice now,” she tells PEOPLE of Keaton’s character. “He was downstairs [in the underworld] waiting a long time. He was the same, only dirtier, older and a little fatter.”

To achieve this new but older version of Beetlejuice, Atwood took her original costume, designed by Aggie Guerard Rodgers, and used it as the basis for what she put together for her film.

“It was an inspiration piece for us, of course, but we remade it in a slightly different fabric that could be crunched,” she says, explaining that she wanted it to look like he had literally been sitting there for years. “We aged him as if he had 30 years in him was the idea. He had a lot of layers of textures and different colors on him. We gave him a little more belly. We wanted look like it’s been down there a long time.”

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Michael Keaton in ‘Beetlejuice’.

Warner Brothers /courtesy of the Everett Collection

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Atwood continues, “We’ve done all that with aging [treatment to] apparel. It’s a slightly softer fabric that creases more and stuff like that. That’s how we dealt with it.”

Beetlejuice’s red wedding tuxedo also returns for this film, and Atwood made a new iteration of it. She says the original was more of a “prom tuxedo,” but she and her team created one that “better suited” Keaton at his current age.

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Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice in ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

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“It’s a little more grown up, but still fresh,” he says of the look. “We ended up doing that and then just doing the typical ruffled tuxedo shirt that Beetlejuice wore.”

From there, Atwood was able to let her creative juices flow a bit more, as Beetlejuice had more costumes in the sequel than in the original film – and some of his outfits in this film were ones that Keaton himself inspired. Atwood tells PEOPLE that Keaton wanted to do a bullfighting scene, so she helped create that look.

“It was fun to have more outfits for Beetlejuice this time around, because we’ve only seen him in those two outfits for a long time,” she says.

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Source: HIS Education