Interview

There was a time when Winona Ryder changed everything. She was like the new prom queen—the one who millions of brainy, brunette girls who’d long since disavowed their interest in prom queens had secretly been waiting for. (Some guys, too.) It was Heathers (1988), a groundbreaking, unsentimental (and very smart and funny) film about a pair of high school outcasts (Ryder and Christian Slater) who wind up taking out a handful of the most popular kids at school, that first earned Ryder favored-actress status amongst those of the Generation Formerly Known as X. That early Ryder image—the dark hair, the porcelain skin, the doe-like, knowing eyes, forever threatening to roll upward—very quickly became burned into peoples’ brains. It’s a singular, powerful image, and one that many directors have deployed in its variations to great effect, from Tim Burton (Beetlejuice, 1988, and Edward Scissorhands, 1990) to Francis Ford Coppola (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1992) to Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence, 1993) to Ben Stiller (Reality Bites, 1994) to James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted, 1999).The headlines offscreen for Ryder are by now well-known. Her real last name is Horowitz, and she grew up on a commune north of San Francisco. Her parents are intellectuals and writers who ran with a counterculture coterie that at various points included Allen Ginsberg and Ryder’s godfather, Timothy Leary. (If it’s any indication of their political leanings, after George W. Bush was reelected in 2004, the Horowitzes moved to Canada.) There’s her relationship with Johnny Depp in the very early ’90s, and her shoplifting arrest in the very early ’00s. But ever since the latter incident—which was followed by a five-year semisabbatical—Ryder, now 38, has led a lower profile in the tabloids, investing herself in other interests, such as writing, and acting mostly in smaller, more independent films. We spoke late one Friday night in September.

STEPHEN MOOALLEM: I was going back and reading through some of your old interviews, and one of the things that I found interesting is that you seemed so self-possessed at such a young age—and very sure of who you were, in a sense. Where do you think that came from?

WINONA RYDER: Well, I think I really scored with my parents. All of my friends pretty much came from broken homes, and my parents are still together, but not only that, they’re still in love and still write together. I really lucked out in terms of how they encouraged me to develop my own personality so I didn’t just feel incredibly insecure and like I didn’t fit in. I just felt, like, well, you know, it’s good to be different. So I never really modeled myself on anyone. I was inspired by lots of people, certainly in acting and in writing and stuff, but I never wanted to be somebody else. My parents really instilled this idea in me of being your own person—almost to the extent that I couldn’t do wrong. I’d get a bad grade and they’d be like, “No! What you did was great!” [laughs]

MOOALLEM: I always wonder about people who experience so much success when they’re so young, like you did. How do you think it affected the way you looked at acting or even just work in general?

RYDER: Well, the fact that I got into this at all was kind of fluke-ish. I loved movies, but I can’t remember ever really wanting to be an actress, and I certainly didn’t imagine ever being in a movie. I think I wanted to be a writer. When I was 12, we moved to -Petaluma [California], and at the first junior high school I went to I got really bullied. After three days, I was put on home study. We had just moved to this town, so I didn’t have any friends, and my parents, god bless them, scrimped and saved to send me to ACT [American Conservatory Theater in San -Francisco] three times a week as a kind of outlet. So I was like taking these acting classes, but I was so young that it wasn’t really in my sights to have a career.