For Catherine O’Hara and Husband Bo Welch, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a Full-Circle Moment
Catherine O’Hara, one of the stars of the much-anticipated Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, walked the Venice Film Festival red carpet for the film’s premiere with her husband. It was a full-circle moment for the couple, as they met while filming the original movie in 1987.
Bo Welch, 72, was a production designer on set. O’Hara played Delia Deetz, the demanding and overbearing mother to Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz.
In an interview with the New Yorker, O’Hara said she moved from Canada, where her comedy sketch show was filming, to Los Angeles to be with Welch: “[He] was very attractive, and he finally asked me out. We went on location at the end of the movie, and we started dating. I moved to L.A. to be with him. Yeah, I moved for love.”
Their romance eventually ignited on set, but it began as a slow burn. They talked all the time and would hang out and have some laughs on set, but Welch never made a move. O’Hara describes the time period: “I thought, ‘He’s going to ask me out. Oh, he’s going to ask me.’ And stupid me, I should have asked him out, but I didn’t.”
Tim Burton gave Welch a nudge when the cast and crew flew to Vermont to film exteriors. “Tim said, ‘Let me see what I can do. So, one of the first days shooting in Vermont, Bo came up to me that day and said, ‘Our department’s going to a swap meet. You want to come?’”
And the rest is history!
O’Hara and Welch got married in 1992 and have two sons, Matthew (30) and Luke (27). They have walked many red carpets together since, but likely none more sentimental and meaningful than the sequel to the film where their relationship began.
However, maintaining a marriage for 32 years is easier said than done. O’Hara has spoken about difficulties over the years: “We’ve been through some dangerous times in our marriage, and thank God we both just really wanted to work on it and stay married,” she said.
Throughout the decades, she and Welch wanted to stay together. O’Hara described the challenge of doing so: “I have friends who’ve been divorced, and one of them really wanted to work on it, and the other didn’t. And you just can’t win. You can’t do anything that way. But thank God we both wanted to when we went through rough times. Respecting each other and talking, but laughing comes from that too.”
