Winona Ryder's Fame Was Nearly Sabotaged by Her Infamy

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 30, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 30, 2024 |

We spend a lot of time here at Pajiba dot com and on the internet at large talking about celebrity and fame. We poke fun at stars because, to a certain extent, we feel like they signed up for it.

Winona Ryder, at one time the most famous woman in the country, doesn’t subscribe to that line of thinking. She was semi-canceled before cancel culture was a thing, at the height of her career, for a “crime” that later teen stars would make look like a regular Tuesday activity, and she’d be forgiven for letting that make her bitter, but she didn’t. If anything, it saved her. Fame, for a young Winona Ryder, was already bittersweet.

“I do remember being treated very differently because of who I was,” Ryder told Esquire magazine in a recent interview. Toward the end of the ’90s, she was struggling both personally and in her career. “Things were changing,” she said. “Studios were getting so much more powerful…all you ever heard was, if you take a break, you can’t come back.” She said she was pushed to do blockbuster movies, which weren’t what she was interested in. When there was something she liked, her fame was a problem.

“There was baggage … Trying to convince someone to ignore the noise around me was tough. I saw it in their eyes. I lost a lot of parts because of that,” she said. She recalled a meeting with Michel Gondry in the early stages of casting Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. “It was such a brilliant script and we were at this little restaurant and people kept coming up to me and there was a random paparazzi guy outside, which was kind of unusual for me, but I just remember [Gondry’s] face, and trying to convince him that this isn’t normal, and I know it’s not normal.”

Obviously, she didn’t get the part.

“There was this whole time when I felt like I would be a distraction, as well. I got it. Certainly, in the 1990s, I became aware of that. And there was a switching-of-the-guard feeling, too. As you get older there are these new, younger actresses. It’s so drilled into you how disposable actresses can be, our shelf life. You hear it all the time.”

But it makes sense, she says, because “if you think about it, the late 1990s, early 2000s, who was on the rise? … Harvey Weinstein.”

She was never going to be Weinstein’s favorite. She says she was blacklisted by Miramax, his company, for “various reasons.” Recalling when they met, she says, “I went to the Miramax office and I extended my hand and he shook my hand and I sat on the couch and we had a conversation and I left. And [afterwards] I got like screamed at [by an agent]…Apparently, I offended him because I extended my hand?”

Another time, she turned down a role he unceremoniously demanded she play. “I think I knew a little bit too much,” she said. “He did not like me.” But she was still a young actress in the ’90s, so she was still, as she puts it, “blatantly” sexually harassed.

“I was lucky because I was known, so it didn’t happen as much as maybe it would if I had been a struggling actor. But I remember this feeling in your mind: you’re negotiating, you’re thinking about what’s going to happen if you say something. You’re working it out while this person is being extremely creepy.”

At some point, it all got to be too much. “I think in retrospect, it really soured [her on making movies]. All the great actors always told me that when it stops being amazing, you gotta get out. I really took that to heart.” Then came the shoplifting scandal heard ‘round the world, and she was out whether she really wanted to be or not.

“There was a period when I was not in season…It was like 10, 12, 15 years, and it did coincide with everything that happened [in her life] but also, if you look at the period from 2000 to 2010: wow! It was the most degrading time to be a woman,” she says of that period.

She doesn’t mind missing out on the brunt of that. But she was still struggling to find good parts and was growing tired of the “Strong female lead” trope. Women “want to play complicated characters” too, she says. “Nuanced. We don’t necessarily want to play strong. We want something to work with!”

Then came Stranger Things. “I really fought for [Joyce’s] flaws…I didn’t want to be like supermom,” she says. It’s a full-circle moment: here’s the part she’s been looking for, and she’s finally being taken seriously. “I’ve gone from being the youngest person on set to being the oldest,” she realizes.

Now that she’s working with kids as young as she was when she started and the world and Hollywood are so different, she says she “can’t imagine” she’d “be an actor” if she’d been born in this generation.

“I don’t subscribe to the theory that acting means signing up to be this public person. I don’t think they’re the same thing. It doesn’t feel right to me,” she says.

She’s no stranger to the public person aspect of acting, but she hasn’t let it ruin her life. She’s the best role model for young actresses like Sadie Sink and Millie Bobby Brown, and she knows it. When it comes to stardom, Winona Ryder is the blueprint.