Esquire, November 1992
by Michael Hirschorn.
LIKE ALL COOL CHICKS OF OUR TIME, WINONA RYDER GOT HER FIRST WHIFF OF
REBELLION FROM J.D. SALINGER. SHE WAS EIGHT WHEN SHE FIRST read The Catcher
in the Rye -- Dad's a writer and bookdealer and an avowed nonconformist, so
young Nonie got stuffed up with books early -- too young, she thinks, to really
bond in a teenage-girl kind of way with Holden Caulfield's hyperpituitary
postwar rebellions. "And then I read it again when I was about twelve and that
was it -- it became the Bible for me." She gets up to fetch a soda. She's near
transparently skinny. "But nice skinny," as Holden would say of his kid sister,
Phoebe, "rollerskate skinny." Winona grabs her Chap Stick and sits back down.
Catcher "is a very comforting thing that I can go to, especially when
I'm traveling," she says. When I'm away from home, I like to read...." She
trails off for a moment. "I don't want to sound too weird about it."
We're sitting in the kind of surroundings that would make Holden rail on
about fakery -- in Catcher he claims to hate movies, so when Winona was a
mere teenager, she thought for a while she had to as well. Holden-like, Winona
hates the word genius, "a word, by the way, that I don't toss around, and I know
a lot of actors do. And I want to specify that -- it's an over-used word, and it
should only be used for people who really are that."
Not long ago, Ryder wrote Salinger a fan letter. "I mean, what do you say to
him, really?" she asks rhetorically. A lot, probably. "I kind of said, um, that
I, uh --" she fumbles a bit with her hair -- "just how much it meant to me, and
thanked him for it." She never mailed the letter. The actress, clad in jeans,
cowboy boots, and a clingy Agnes B.-type jersey, is enveloped by a big beige
couch amid the shiny tapioca-hued splendor of a New York hotel suite. She's
spending a couple of weeks here, listening to her music tapes, buying an East
Coast pad, working the phone to finalize big power negotiations for
the-role-of-a-life-time-that-she-really-wants-to-tell-me-about-but-she's-afraid-to-jinx-it-you-understand.
In a few days, Johnny Depp with whom she's said to have reconciled after some
rumored dalliances on her part will whisk her up to the Montreal Film Festival
for a Tim Burton tribute. Burton's something of a mentor, having directed her in
Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, with Depp.
She doesn't go out much these days, she says; gets "very paranoid." Not that
anyone would notice her in the musty crush of late-summer New York. Startlingly
small, petite to the edge of fragility, she would seem bait more for those who
pick on the waifish than for the gardenvariety celebrity stalker. One comes upon
Winona's beauty as if upon a stunning miniature in a curio shop. She's supposed
to be the sweet teen star next door. But close up, as the camera sees her, she
has an astonishing beauty. With brilliant, enveloping brown eyes that set off a
pert nose and luminescent skin, Ryder's face is no mere confection crafted
through hundreds of dollars of makeup but a classically comely mug, all the
subtle tug of softness and definition of a young Natalie Wood.
And now, apparently, she knows it, too. For the first time, says Cher, who
became Winona's de facto older sister after starring with her in Mermaids,
"she's into posing for sexy pictures and having people think of her as a really
beautiful babe."
Winona is preternaturally articulate for a twenty-one-year-old, free of most
of the, like, you know, verbal crutches that give teen-speak its comic
syncopations. She has not gone and does not intend to go to college, though more
than one pimply faced freshman would kill to see her in a black turtleneck
sipping cappuccino and expounding rapturously on the subverted marriage plot in
Jane Austen (whom she also loves, by the way, and who is in fact a genius).
"Winona has this bristling intelligence," says Anthony Hopkins, who costars with
Ryder in the forthcoming Bram Stoker's Dracula. "She was constantly
asking me, 'Have you read this and have you read that?' I hadn't even heard of
some of the books."
As we're wallowing in the fetid aftermath of the Republican convention, I'm
eager to quiz young Ryder on her political views which turn out not too
surprisingly to be an extension of those held by her way-progressive parents
(Ryder's an Amnesty International volunteer). "I haven't been following the
Republican convention," she says, "just because it kind of makes me sick." She's
not too eager to talk State of the Nation, it turns out, but just as I'm about
to move on to other subjects, she launches into a funny rant about the vagaries
of life along the glitzpower corridor.
"I got an invitation before I came to New York to go to a thing for Clinton,"
she says. "I was invited by a very big movie star to their house, and I thought,
Why would I want to go to this movie star whom I've never met's house, and
why would they want me there?. That's what confuses me: They invite a lot of
people who I think couldn't find their ass with both hands. I think it's great
for my generation to grow up politically active and do what they can for what
they really believe in but it has to be for something they know about, because
so many times I hear actors talking about politics and I can tell that if
someone asked them a question they probably wouldn't be able to answer it."
Politics aside, her friends caution against the idea that Winona is some type
of postpubescent supersophisticate. "She's still kind of a baby," says Cher.
"She's naive and really adorable.and as an actress she has a lot more experience
than she does as a person." By way of example, Michelle Pfeiffer recalls how she
convinced Ryder and Cher to uke a sculpting class. When the class arranged for a
male model to pose nude, "I can't tell you how many shades of red Winona
turned," Pfeiffer says with a wicked chuckle. "As soon as the model walks out in
his robe and takes it off, Winona turns scarlet and starts giggling
uncontrollably for twenty minutes. She had to move around to the back of the
class."
For all the giggles, Ryder is a surprisingly savvy curator of her own
reputation during what is after all a still-very-brief career it's been a mere
six years since her debut in 1986's Lucas. (In fact, she only changed her name
from Horowitz to Ryder just before Lucas was released.) While other actresses
her age have given their souls to cheesy productions that rob them of their good
names and much of their clothing, Ryder has made a very few bad movie choices
and a very many good ones. She starred in Heathers, which remains the
definitive black comedy of Reagan-youth lust and greed. Heathers
screenwriter Daniel Waters, by the way, gets the much-coveted genius billing.
("Oops! And there I go using that word again.") She played a riotous Wednesday
Addams turn in Beetlejuice and turned in a fine performance in artmeister
Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth. She recently finished The Age of
Innocence, directed by Martin Scorsese. The movie, which was not finished on
schedule, won't be released until next year.
And in what will surely represent her cinematic coming-out party, her final
ascendance to a kind of psychic R-rating in the public's mind, she appears as
Mina in Francis Ford Coppola's lavish and very bloody and very sexy
Dracula, out this month. Along with her appearance in the Scorsese film
-- and that incredibly-exciting-I-can't-tell-you-about-it project -- Ryder is
set to become the most prominent and powerful movie actress of her generation.
She is about to become a star in the old-fashioned sense, a classic combination
of glamour, talent, and ambition.
Much will be made of the Coppola-Ryder rapprochement, especially following
the gossip storm after physical exhaustion left her unable to perform a key role
in Coppola's The Godfather, Part III. At the time, there were trashy
rumors involving pregnancy, drug use, and Depp-related weirdness. Coppola, on
short notice, gave the role to his daughter, and, well, one can imagine what
might have been.
Coppola says that six months after The Godfather III problems, he set
up a brief meeting with Ryder to assure her that he bore her no grudge and that,
for all the gossip, "I took her problem at face value. My feeling was that I
didn't want a young person to feel I was mad at her I wanted to make sure she
didn't feel that I disliked her. She was very concerned that she had let me
down." Ironically, it was at this meeting that Ryder proposed the idea of
Dracula. "She said, 'Oh, I have this script I love,'" he recalls.
The movie, which also stars Keanu Reeves and Gary Oldman, as Dracula, is said
to be intense stuff -- maybe too intense. A preview audience in San Diego, which
saw a very rough cut of the film, was repulsed by the blood and guts and found
the movie too confusing to boot. "I did use the horror and the metaphor of blood
which I see as a symbol of life's passion," admits Coppola. "But it's very much
interwoven with themes of love." Now that the plasma factor has been reduced to
palatable levels in re-editing, Coppola promises that audiences will "primarily
say this is a love story."
The movie, in any case, promises to be Ur-Gothic. In a key scene, Ryder's
character, Mina, succumbs to the pagan pleasures of vampirism by sucking the
blood from an open vein in Dracula's chest. Fabulously campy, very adult, and a
long way from the joys of PG-rated fell-good thespianism in Welcome Home,
Roxy Carmichael.
Ryder was aware of the dangers inherent in entering the very adult maw of
Coppola's ego. "Things got chaotic at times, and things got very intense," she
says of the filming of Dracula, much of which took place in northern California.
"Francis has a way of setting a mood -- he plays games with you, plays tricks on
you that work that I appreciate." Like what?
"There was a scene where I had to feel incredible guilt because I've been
caught doing something that I shouldn't be doing," she says, curling into her
cushions and folding her arms under her breasts. "And I have to have this
breakdown... of feeling very guilty, and I just remember kind of being on the
bed and -- I wasn't in the mood to do the scene, I just wasn't. And I thought,
Well, I'll just kind of try and see what happens. And it just wasn't working and
he wouldn't cut. He just kept making me get up and get back on the bed and get
back in bed. And then he started, and then all of a sudden I heard Keanu's voice
and his [Coppola's] voice calling me names, like, 'Whore, how could you do this?
How could you do this.'
"I just really started feeling it and kind of started to cry all of a sudden.
In fact, I was kind of weeping, and he wouldn't cut; he just made me do it again
and again until I was really out of my mind. Finally, the last time, I did it,
which must have been about fifteen times without a cut. I just had enough,
enough, because I couldn't take it anymore."
WINONA HOROWITZ is happy being Winona Ryder, and why not? A child of
less-than-flush-rich bohemian parents she spent much of her youth in Petaluma,
California, among left-wing intellectuals (famously, Timothy Leary is her
godfather) -- she can now bop around the globe, ingesting culture and finding
new movie stars and directors and writers and cinematographers to work with. She
now wants to direct (of course) and produce (attention Joel Silver). "She always
puts her foot right," says Jay Cocks, who wrote the screenplay adaptation of
The Age of Innocence. Even if she's wearing Doc Martens."
"Radio Free Winona," as Cocks calls her, is getting contemplative now,
tucking into the requisite what-it-means-to-be-me part of our conversation.
"I'll just be sitting there, watching them set up," she says, her eyes yawing
open to provide visual emphasis, "and I'll be thinking, My God, this is like
watching a movie in itself!" For once she looks wonderstruck as she moons
off into space somewhere between the minibar and the toobillowy chiffony
curtains.
To twenty-one-year-old Winona Ryder, it is a genius world after all.
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Vogue, October 1993
by David Handelman .
Last spring Winona Ryder was "in really bad shape," she says. "Miserable."
Some of her childhood friends had recently been killed in a freak accident; a
guy she'd been madly in love with as a kid had just been diagnosed with AIDS;
her relationship with Johnny Depp had been ending for about a year. Yet instead
of confronting these crises, she was sequestered in Portugal, acting in her
third consecutive, heavy-duty, all-star, grown-up drama -- House of the
Spirits, with Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, and Glenn Close, which followed
Martin Scorsese's , with Daniel Day-Lewis and
Michelle Pfeiffer, and Francis Ford Coppola's mock-opera Bram Stoker's
Dracula. (And, during a few weeks off, she'd played Lady Anne in Al Pacino's
personal documentary about playing Richard III.)
It didn't help matters that the character she was playing, Blanca Truebas,
had her own Strum und Drang to wrestle with: being abused by her father, losing
her mother, bearing a child out of wedlock, think her lover dead, and being
tortured in prison. The actress began suffering from intense insomnia. "I was so
worried about getting sleep that I couldn't fall asleep," say Ryder, who turns
22 this month. "I had this digital clock, and every time I barely opened my
eyes, I saw these huge red numbers saying 3:30 AM -- OK, I have two and a half
hours before I have to get up." She finally sought help from a sleep clnic,
where she was told to get rid of the digital clock. "But the insomnia was really
a symptom of something else, which was just an identity crisis," she explains.
"If you spend your most crucial adolescent years being watched by millions of
people" -- Ryder's first screen role, as a soulful tomboy in Lucas, came
when she was thirteen -- "being told what's good and what's bad, you have no
sense of who you are."
Meanwhile the cast and crew who were watching Ryder's performance in dailies
kept telling her, "You're so great! You must've really used all that stuff."
This completely unnerved her. "I started thinking, 'God, did I? Was it good
that I was going through it?' But I decided, I don't care if someone says,
'You're going to win every award in the world for this performance, but you
could have only done it because you were going through that stuff.' I'd still go
back and want to be really happy, and be bad in the movie! I know that sounds
horrible, like I'm not committed to my work, or passionate about it, but I am.
"A lotof great actors, some of my favorites, say, 'My work is my life.' And
for a long time I felt if I didn't think that, I wasn't a serious actress -- if
I didn't suffer, then I wasn't good. It's this idea that's really carved into
young actors' minds: 'Use it. Be depressed, suffer, call upon horrible
experiences,' that only a licenses therapist, no acting coach, should be able to
bring out. And in the last year, I came to the realization that I can be just as
good an actress--in fact, I think a better actress--being a happy person.. Not
having all that drama in my life. Doing fun things, acting my age for a change.
Not acting like I'm 40 and divorced five times. You don't have to be
miserable to be a good actress."
Previously she had often felt just like May Welland, the character she plays
in The Age of Innocence. Reading the book and script, Ryder had been
struck by the similarities between the social mores of 1870s New York and those
of 1990s Hollywood. "You were so restricted in what was an appropriate thing to
say. There was a lot of gossip, but not to someone's face. You'd always smile
even though you didn't want to, or say everything was fine when it wasn't. Just
like May knows how to get by in that society, I know how to get by in the
industry, what the protocol is. But it's pretty lame, and that's why I've been
trying to separate it from my life when I'm not working."
In April, after finishing Spirits, Ryder landed in her New York
apartment and finished breaking up with Depp, who will probably have to undergo
extensive tattoo removal. "He's a special guy,"she says today. "I was just
really young. I don't know what his excuse is, but that's mine!" Suddenly she
was able to sleep again,
Then, on a whim, she attended a taping of MTV Unplugged featuring Soul
Asylum, the Minneapolis rock band who've recently graduated from cult heroes to
platinum sellers. "I'd been listening to them a lot in Europe," she says. "Music
was the one thing that helped me through that movie." Afterward, she was
introduced to lead singer Dave Pirner. "I was very surprised when I saw him. I
that he had red hair. The pictures on the CDs are really small."
Two weeks later, she invited him to her house in Los Angeles. "We had pizza.
Domino's. Mushroom. Our schedules didn't really allow picnics at the beach. But
it was still very romantic. We were talking so much, the pizza got cold. I
wanted to fry it, and he said, 'That's impossible,' because he thought after
being in a band for seven years he knew every trick for heating up pizza. But I
totally fried it! It was like a montage sequence."
Although Ryder has endured the usual rumors, linked with virtually every
costar, if not actor, in town, she says, "None of that was true. None of the
costars except for [Heathers's] Christian Slater, who I went out with for
two weeks, and he broke my heart. Or I thought he did at the time. Dave is only
like my second boyfriend."
She and Pirner reconvened in New Orleans in June and had, she says, "the
greatest time. I was completely removed from being Winona Ryder the Actress. I
was just this girl in corduroy shorts and a really dirty T-shirt, with just a
credit card. And people were so nice. I'd lived in this weird shell of paranoia
for so long, and then it just cracked open. I was playing pool with gangs of I
don't know who. At first they'd be like, 'Ooooh, you were in
Beetlejuice,' and five minutes later they'd be like, 'Your turn.' And I
was doing these really nutty things, walking down the street at three in the
morning doing Jell-O shots. For me, it was very reckless, because I never do
anything like that.
"It entered my mind when I was telling someone about it, I could picture
myself in a moment of total bliss saying, 'Oh, let's get married right now!' I
mean, I wouldn't do it, and the institution of marraige is something I question
for people my age. But I thought, God, if the press had seen me in New Orleans,
they could've made it into anything. I don't know what Julia Roberts did [in
marrying Lyle Lovett after a two week courtship], but it could've been like
that. She could've been so far away from Julia Roberts, the Actress--'Hey, let's
get married!' I think whatever you want to do in your life is just fine, as long
as you want to do it, and you're not doing it for effect or attention."
That attitude applies to her career, as well. After Spirits, she fell
in love with an autobiographical script by 23-year-old rookie screenwriter Helen
Childress called Reality Bites, about a girl; who graduates as
valedictorian from college but gets fired from her first job and then can't find
work even at Wendy's. Her costars are Ethan Hawke, Janeane Garofalo (of TV's
Larry Sanders Show), and Ben Stiller, who is also making his directorial
debut. "A lot of people told me, 'You just did a Scorsese movie! You can't do
this young, first-time director project,'" she says. "And I said, 'I want to act
my age for once. Why am I concerned with being older? I have plenty of time for
that!' Also, alot of people my age have come up to me and said, 'Why don't you
do a movie about us?' For some reason people think it's less serious to
do a movie with young people. I was really affected by Flirting--I saw it
seven or eight times. I thought it was one of the few movies that did not treat
yung people or young love in a patronizing way."
Her only worry is that, after all the costumes, accents, and high drama, this
contempory romantic comedy might tempt her to slip into lazy, adorable
mannerisms that are the bane of her existence. "I don't want to turn into Winona
Ryder Being Cute. Everyone assumes that doing a movie like this is so easy, but
it's actually really hard.... If I had been trying to just be appealing from the
start of my career, I would be over now. That's never been my agenda."
Next on that agenda is applying to college. (She finished high school with
the help of private tutoring.) "I really want to study English literature, read
a lot of classics, take some philosophy #####----------##### think it will help
my work a lot. I read so many scripts, I want to take a break from that. I want
to read books and talk about them. I don't want to make a big deal of it. I just
want to start by taking some classes. I'm trying to find out how I can do it in
a way where I can miss classes and it's not going to fuck me up."
Now that she's a seasoned veteran, initiating projects and working with
top-notch directors, is her own age of innocence over? She ponders this and
decides, "Yes, but I'm still innocent. I'm just not so naive. Maybe I'm getting
innocent mixed up with corny. I feel I still have a lot to learn, but that
doesn't make me innocent, does it? Innocent can be--you're innocent until proven
guilty."
Or pure. "I think I'm pretty pure. I don't know. Every day is a struggle to
be these things, but it's worth it. It's really easy to be depressed and be a
bad person, and dishonest, and it's hard to be good and honest and happy. It
takes effort, it's scarier, but it's so much better."
She calls back the next day from her dressing room. Pirner, she reports, is
coming to visit. "He called me and said he'd gone into a truck stop in Oklahoma
City to play pinball, and after he started he realized he was playing the Winona
Ryder Dracula pinball machine. He said, "I couldn't tell if it made my
day or ruined my game.'"
But she had really called to clarify something. "It feels so un-innocent to
say I haven't lost my innocence. I just wanted to say what sounded best, or
coolest, but I really didn't know, so I took a poll!" She laughs. "I asked
[longtime friends] Kevin, Helene, Charlene, Rick and Heather, really casually,
'Do you think of me as being innocent?' and unanimously, they said yes. I trust
those guys. So I'd go with that."
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