It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in lockdown during the pandemic of 2020 must have watched the BBC hit Normal People. Or, in the case of Hollywood legend Winona Ryder, watched it three times. While sobbing.
“You know what’s saved me?” she says slowly from her LA home, when we speak via FaceTime. She is sipping coffee and sitting in front of an enormous bookcase. It is the week of the Black Lives Matter protests, and Ryder, glued to the news, is feeling emotional. “I’ll be weeping all day and then I’ll be weeping all night because I’m watching Normal People. I watched it for the third time last night. And I’m planning on watching it more,” she says of the story of tortured love between the teenagers Marianne and Connell. “It’s just so good. I felt like I was that age again. And I am obsessed with those two!’ she sighs, meaning the British and Irish actors Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal. “I feel like, weirdly, because I’m older, I’m so proud of them … I’m going to write them letters, I just don’t know what to say!” she adds giddily.
Coming from the woman whose early career is the blueprint for cinematic adolescent angst, this is quite the compliment. Whether the deliciously dark Veronica Sawyer in Heathers, Cher’s troubled daughter Charlotte in Mermaids, or goth hero Lydia in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, Ryder knows how to play coming of age better than most. After starting her acting career at the age of 15, she became one of the defining, and most famous, actresses of the 1980s and 1990s, an offbeat, pixieish beauty whose sardonic on-screen delivery and grunge aesthetic made her a pin-up for the disaffected youth of gen X.
Then came the big hitters: Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (she won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of May Welland), Little Women (Jo, before Saoirse Ronan, and another Oscar nomination), and Girl, Interrupted, on which she was also an executive producer.
What really set her apart from her peers, however, was the obsession that she inspired. There were T-shirts with Ryder’s name on, pop songs immortalising her, bands named after her, guest appearances on both Friends and The Simpsons, those lightning rods of 1990s pop culture. And, yes, an engagement to Johnny Depp when she was just 18 that sent the tabloids wild. Winona — for there is only one Winona — was cool in a way that her contemporaries (Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock) could never be: a cult indie icon who has never followed the standard Hollywood rules.
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With huge fame, however, comes huge, well, sacrifices. Ryder is particularly private, having understandably battened down the hatches some years ago. Is she the fragile, intense woman portrayed in the media? Perhaps — which is part of the charm — but despite normal neuroses around the current world situation (“I was lying in bed last night and I was like, God, does anything even matter any more?”), she is also wonderfully warm (“Look after your babies!” she tells me as we say goodbye), smart and self-assured. Conversation is a little meandering — sentences go unfinished and she forgets what we’re talking about more than once (“Wait, what did you just ask?”) — but, phew, she is still cool as hell in her vintage Kate Bush T-shirt, hair scraped back. So far, so Winona.
In the past few years television is where she has found her best roles, a renaissance of sorts, first as Joyce Byers in Netflix’s Stranger Things, for which she received another Golden Globe nomination. Next up is The Plot Against America, based on the Philip Roth novel of the same name and created by David Simon and Ed Burns, the men behind The Wire. In this alternate history of America in the 1940s, Ryder plays Evelyn, the single older sister in a Jewish family, as a fascist leader comes to power. “There’s a lot of hate out there. And he knows how to tap into it,” is a line from the show about the new fictional president. Sound familiar? “Can you believe that?” Ryder shakes her head. “It’s pretty incredible how relevant it is.”
Born Winona Laura Horowitz in 1971 in a town called, yes, Winona, she was in part drawn to the history in The Plot Against America because of her own heritage. She is Jewish: “Not religious, but I do identify. It’s a hard thing for me to talk about because I had family who died in the camps, so I’ve always been fascinated with that time.” Has she experienced antisemitism herself? “I have … in interesting ways. There are times when people have said, ‘Wait, you’re Jewish? But you’re so pretty!’ There was a movie that I was up for a long time ago, it was a period piece, and the studio head, who was Jewish, said I looked ‘too Jewish’ to be in a blue-blooded family.” The real jaw-dropper, however, involves, wait for it, Mel Gibson. “We were at a crowded party with one of my good friends, and Mel Gibson was smoking a cigar, and we’re all talking and he said to my friend, who’s gay, ‘Oh wait, am I gonna get Aids?’ And then something came up about Jews, and he said, ‘You’re not an oven dodger, are you?’ ” She shakes her head, incredulously. (Gibson apparently “tried” to apologise at a later date.)
Ah, Hollywood. Ryder grew up in the film industry of the 1980s and 1990s, when sexism, bullying, racism and homophobia were normalised, a time before #MeToo and holding the industry to account. I read her a quote from an old interview she gave when she was 19, in which she describes “50 photographers” trying to trip her as she got off a plane, while calling her “a whore”. “I remember that,” she says today. “I was flying back from Florida doing Edward Scissorhands and they actually did trip me. It really messed me up. I was so paranoid. It was hard, especially for a really private person. I had to learn a lot of lessons early on.”
Another anecdote that stopped me in my tracks while researching was that during the filming of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as Ryder lies on a bed with Dracula, who is about to turn into “a bunch of rats”, the director, Francis Ford Coppola, was off camera, shouting, “You whore! You whore!” (Whore was obviously the 1990s insult of choice.) Ryder was 20. “To put it in context I’m supposed to be crying,” she remembers today. “Literally, Richard E Grant, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu … Francis was trying to get all of them to yell things that would make me cry. But Keanu wouldn’t, Anthony wouldn’t … the more it happened, I was like [she crosses her arms like a sulky teenager and frowns] … It just didn’t work. I was, like, really? It kind of did the opposite.” She seems unfazed. “Me and Francis are good now,” she smiles.
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Teen stardom, a relentless schedule, no wonder she eventually had what she now calls a meltdown. “I think I worked so hard, then I started getting really, really tired. It was definitely exhaustion and the first break-up [with Depp], and kind of that identity crisis.” She suffered anxiety attacks, but she hasn’t had one “for a long time”. This was an era before the phrase “mental health” was part of the national conversation. Did therapy work for her? “Definitely. I had a great therapist,” although “he retired a few months later”, she says, mock crying. She admits she wasn’t always treated equally in the industry and had some bad experiences, but Ryder says she was “never really traumatised or anything like that”. Certainly she was “a little headstrong”: when her agent suggested she turn down Heathers, the film that made her, she ditched the agent and went ahead with the film. Aged 17.
Today she is grateful she didn’t come of age during the time of social media. Ryder is a tech Luddite and has never signed up to any platform, despite “firm suggestions” from industry people that it would help her career. She feels protective of the child actors on Stranger Things. “I worry about them a lot, because it’s so overwhelming. Social media can be so isolating. I’ve watched people get really upset and go into real depressions because of it, actors who get, what do you call it, ‘tro …?’ ” Trolled, I tell her. “When I hear ‘followers’, I think of Charles Manson, and when I hear ‘viral’, I think of a virus,” she laughs. I am not sure she could withstand a Twitter storm or cancel culture — although who can? “People have sort of stopped pressuring me to get on social media because they know I’ve worked really hard to have this life for myself,” she says quietly. “I’m a fan of mystery.”
When asked about her boyfriend, the handsome, silver-haired Scott Mackinlay Hahn, who she is currently spending lockdown with, she becomes pointedly monosyllabic, polite but firm. He is a co-founder of the “sustainable apparel brand” Loomstate, and they have reportedly been dating for about nine years, with Ryder only going so far as to say that the secret to their relationship is “friendship”. Her bohemian intellectual parents, Michael and Cynthia (LSD guru Timothy Leary was Winona’s godfather, and beat poet Allen Ginsberg was another friend of her parents), have been married for 50 years and still “giggle and make out”. She is close to them — she has never had children herself — and misses them like crazy; they live in Vancouver. “It’s awful. They don’t know how to use Zoom. They have flip phones and a landline! Normally, I would be up there right now.”
Ryder will be 50 next year, although when I tell her this, it seems to come as a surprise. “No, 49! No, wait, wait, no, you’re right!” she says, eyes widening. How does it feel? “God, I … [her voice drops] Yeah … I’m 50 … [she trails off] Is that, like, a little bit older than middle age?” she asks me, as if it’s suddenly just dawned on her that she’s not 28 any more. She has, she says, noticed that when she overhears the younger kids talking to someone about her, “they say, ‘She’s a really nice lady,’ and just the word lady …” We both start laughing. “I know, right?”
Still, she looks as girlish as she always has: that gamine face, eyes ringed with black kohl. What’s her secret? Botox? Green juices? A picture stored away in the attic? “If you met my parents, I look like both of them, and I was really lucky genetically,” she says. She has always been “really waify” and “never had to exercise”, although in the past few years she has panicked slightly and bought a Pilates machine on the recommendation of her sister. “It’s the classic thing, when you’re young and people are, like, ‘Wait till you get older,’ and then you hit, like, 42 and your back starts … I wish I had listened. You can be waify and really out of shape. So I’m trying to incorporate some strengthening stuff. You still have to exercise, you have to look after the bones.”
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She used to suffer from insomnia, but these days, she says, she has “come to understand I’m just a very nocturnal person”. Bedtime is, I am shocked to hear, normally about 3.30am, which she admits is difficult when she is working. What about “wellness”? I am relieved that it isn’t her thing; when I ask her to forgive me for getting “all Gwyneth Paltrow”, she laughs, perhaps a little too hard. (The two were friends in the 1990s before a rumoured fall-out.) Her idea of self-care is a good book — reading is a constant theme in our conversation, and I come away with about four book recommendations, like the indie version of Richard and Judy’s book club — and the occasional martini. She used to smoke, but gave up years ago. As for tweakments, there is a lot of pressure to get stuff done, but she isn’t interested: “People almost say it like it’s a hygiene thing, but I don’t like how it looks. I’m a little too fearful that it could go wrong.”
Fashion has always been in thrall to Ryder, but seemingly more so of late. “Why Winona Ryder’s ’90s style still rules!” screamed one recent headline. They’re not wrong: vintage Ryder is a captivating mix of all-black gothic glamour and off-duty masculine tailoring, like a Depop account come to life. She is bemused by the nostalgia — little wonder when the world still sees you, stuck in time, as a leather-jacketed, Johnny Depp-dating teenager. (For the record, she and Depp still speak.) She seems alarmed when I ask her if she ever looks back and thinks “Crikey, I was cool”. “No! No! God, there are terrible pictures of me out there, wearing terrible things,” she says. Unsure of where those pictures are, I ask if she was dressed by designers. “Giorgio Armani would give me suits, kind of like men’s suits … Everything I had was black. And it still is!” She is a big collector of vintage T-shirts: “There’s this one picture of me in a Tom Waits T-shirt and a leather jacket at the premiere of The Commitments — I still have that T-shirt.” In fact, she says she has more than a thousand band T-shirts, including ones inherited from Allen Ginsberg.
There is one thing from the 1990s that has most definitely stood the test of time, however, and that is her friendship with Keanu Reeves. I tell her I watched Destination Wedding the previous night, the 2018 romcom they both starred in. “Really?” she says, eyes rolling. “It got the worst reviews,” she laughs. She has a “buffer” system with her parents, whereby she gets them to read reviews first and then send them to her, “but that movie, for some reason, every reviewer was like, ‘This is the worst movie in the world,’ and it was really rough”. She has done four movies with Keanu; she grins when she talks about him. “I love Keanu. We’re great friends. I miss him so much, and it’s hard because he’s not far, just over there,” she points wistfully out of the window. Maybe she could go for a socially distanced walk with him? She seems unsure: “That’s the hardest thing, I don’t know with this virus, can you just go over and …?” Winona, for the love of God, go and sit in Keanu’s garden. Please. OK, “I’m going to call Keanu!” she says, brightening.
Perhaps her friendship with Reeves is down to the fact that not many people can understand what it’s like to have been through the Hollywood machine and come out the other side. Ryder is that rare thing, the child star who made it. She acknowledges that it was tough: “There was pressure around transitioning from ingenue to older, and people were, like, ‘A lot of people don’t make it, you know,’ and they really drove it home.” Not only that, but she has also seen others who did not make it, in other ways. “We’ve lost a lot of young actors that I knew and worked with,” she says thoughtfully.
Is she happier now, at 48, than she was at, say, 28? “I didn’t like my thirties,” she admits. “My thirties were more like my twenties. I have really liked my forties.” She smiles, eyes creasing: “It’s like that line from The First Wives Club, there’s only three roles, ‘babe, district attorney and Driving Miss Daisy’. So finding the roles in between that carry me …” she drifts off. “And now I’m the mom!” she laughs, delighted.
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The Plot Against America is on Sky Atlantic and Now TV from July 14
