Catherine O’Hara on her ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ ‘Schitt’s Creek’ moment (exclusive)

Warning: This article contains mild spoilers from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Catherine O’Hara isn’t sure if her Beetlejuice director, Tim Burton, saw Schitt’s Creek. She suspects he hasn’t, but the comedic force from Canada does acknowledge that one particular moment in the sequel is too good to be a coincidence.

At the very beginning of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, in theaters now, audiences find that O’Hara’s Delia Deetz took her art to a new level after all these years. She moved away from sculpture and into the audio-visual medium. Her first scene in the film takes place at her art gallery, as she calls her stepdaughter Lydia (Winona Ryder) to relay the news of Charles’ death.

There’s a certain art installation within the gallery that might stand out more to Schitt’s Creek fans: Delia, dressed in a white, floor-length ensemble, is seen flapping her arms like wings in front of a projection of flying crows. It’s very reminiscent of The Crows Have Eyes, the movie that O’Hara’s Moira Rose films during the later seasons of the Emmy-winning comedy series.

In a conversation with costar Ryder for Entertainment Weekly, O’Hara recalls shooting that sequence. “First, it was going to be different birds, and then it turned out to be crows,” she says. “Then Tim said, ‘Do you want to flap your arms?’ And I did. But I thought, Did Tim ever see Schitt’s Creek? I have a feeling he didn’t, and I didn’t want to presume… ’cause it sounded, I don’t know, ego-based. ‘Perhaps you’ve seen my work.’ So I didn’t say anything and I thought he probably won’t use it.”

But then he did! “I really have no idea whether Tim’s ever seen Schitt’s Creek or knows any crow thing,” O’Hara continues. “Isn’t it weird?! It’s weird that I am flapping my arms, and there’s crows.”

Ryder sees the similarities between Delia Deetz and Moira Rose. “They’re both artists,” she says. “And they’re sensitives.”

“They think they are,” O’Hara adds. “Nobody understands how much they have to offer in every kind of creativity, in every creative endeavor. They are so multi-talented, and no one seems to get it.”

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The actress, who won an Emmy for playing the Rose family matriarch and overly dramatic soap star in 2020, says there are other noteworthy art installations in Delia’s gallery at the beginning of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. She remembers filming in an actual art gallery in London.

“I wish you could see every piece of that with a program with the best bulls— art speak, all the blurbs written about each piece,” she tells Ryder. “But ahead of time, months ahead, Tim would write or call and say, ‘Okay, I’m thinking of this, and I think the theme should be herself, her body, her thing. But do you have any ideas?’ And then I got to send crazy — that are in the movie — these art pieces that I got to do. He knew he wanted to do projections and he knew he wanted to do sculpture, but he was like, ‘Whatever ideas you have. So it was me, Delia, getting to help make my ridiculous show. So fun.”