Winona Ryder forever: The return of the ‘weird girl’ that Weinstein hated

At one point in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), sitting on a cemetery bench, complains to her daughter (Jenna Ortega) that “death is hard.” “Sometimes I think life is even harder,” the teenager replies. The camera pans to a close-up of her resigned mother before the Warner Bros. logo makes its epic entrance and interrupts the conversation.

It is not surprising that this scene has been such a big part of the promotion of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the sequel to Tim Burton’s 1980s classic. Anyone who knows just a bit about Ryder’s career can appreciate the significance of that line. Thirty-six years on from Beetlejuice — the movie that catapulted Ryder to international fame when she was just a teenager — its sequel has been making waves at the Venice Film Festival, where the press has praised Ryder’s performance as “excellent” and “charming.”

The movie has shown that Ryder still has that mix of innocence and daring, vulnerability and rebellion, delicacy and mystery, that made her one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the 1990s. A star that faded — or was extinguished — at the turn of the century, but that is now — thanks to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — back in the limelight. After being cast out of the film industry for two decades, Ryder is back. Death in Hollywood is hard, but Ryder’s life in the movie mecca has been even harder.

“There was a period when I was not in season,” the actress recently admitted. A period she says lasted 10, 12, 15 years… She hesitates to say exactly how long it took her to climb her way back to Hollywood, a process that began with a small supporting role in Black Swan. Then came her role as Joyce Byers in the hit Netflix show Stranger Things, when many realized she wasn’t picked for the part out of nostalgia, but because of her undoubtable talent.

Ten years have passed since then — she is currently filming the last season of Stranger Things — but even more time has passed since she first met with Burton about doing the Beetlejuice sequel, which also brings back Michael Keaton as the bio-exorcist Betelgeuse and Catherine O’Hara, who plays Lydia’s stepmother. Ryder, 52, may be leading a movie projected to be one of this year’s top five box office hits, but that hasn’t changed her one bit. She still refuses to join social media, wear heels on the red carpet — she prefers boots — and to hire a stylist, preferring to pick out her own outfits and follow her intuition.

And Ryder’s intuition is the stuff of legend in Hollywood. “Her instincts about people and situations are incredible,” producer Denise Di Novi told British Vogue in 1994. “Winona is sort of like from her own plane.”

This sixth sense helped her avoid convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, the influential producer who reigned in Hollywood at the same that Ryder was riding high with hits such as Edward Scissorhands, Reality Bites and Little Women. Johnny Depp, her co-star in Edward Scissorhands, famously tattooed “Winona Forever” on his right arm and the pair instantly became the hottest couple of their generation.

But Ryder recently claimed that Weinstein blacklisted her. “The one time I was supposed to have a meeting with [Weinstein], 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,” Ryder said. “And [afterwards] I got like screamed at [by an agent]. ‘What the fuck did you do?’ I was like, ‘What?’ Apparently, I offended him because I extended my hand?” the actress told Variety. According to the actress, Weinstein was one of the main reasons her career took a dive: “He did not like me.”

The other reason is well-known. In 2001, Ryder was arrested for stealing $6,000 worth of designer clothes from a Beverly Hills department store. The footage of her arrest made headlines across the world. The fact that the actress apologized, confessed to being addicted to barbiturates and spoke about her mental health problems made no difference: while all-powerful sexual predators were running wild in Hollywood, the actress was ridiculed and vilified. So much so that her meteoric career not only came plummeting down, she was also on the verge of being sent to prison.

“Winona Forever” became “Free Winona.” She was sentenced to three years of probation, 480 hours of community service, a $10,000 fine and had to go to therapy. “Her career has been used as a defining example of the double-standard of how men and women are treated in Hollywood,” said film critic Scott Mendelson.

And when Hollywood finally decided to welcome Ryder back into the fold, she came up against the industry’s ageism. While her former co-stars, such as Depp himself or Adam Sandler, were now starring opposite actresses in their early twenties (Christina Ricci, Bella Heathcote), Ryder — at just 37 years of age — had to settle for roles such as Spock’s mother in Star Trek.

Ryder has called the decade between 2000 and 2010 the “most degrading time to be a woman in Hollywood.” “Actresses were being punished for not getting the joke, or not playing along. Everyone was trying to be the cool girl, sexualized but also one of the guys… I thought it was demeaning. I just remember feeling like, ‘Man, if this is the future, we’re fucked,’” she told Esquire.

She moved to San Francisco, the city where she grew up, to get away from the noise. In 2010, at a party for the premiere of Black Swan, Scott Mackinlay Hahn, an eco-friendly designer, congratulated her on her performance in The Fifth Element. Although she did not appear in that film, Ryder was flattered that he had confused her for Milla Jovovich. The two began dating and announced that they will tie the knot later this year. “She’s also a survivor, of dizzying early success, of scandal, of sexism, of ageism, of her own mistakes and of the appalling behavior of others,” said editor Alex Bilmes in Esquire.

Today the actress is finally free, both personally and professionally. The release of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice closes the circle that began when she was just 16 and changed her life forever. After the success of the first film, Winona had to leave school after being bullied by her classmates, who called her a “witch.” “I was wearing an old Salvation Army–shop boy’s suit. I had a hall pass, so I went to the [girls’] bathroom. I heard people saying, ‘Hey, faggot.’ They slammed my head into a locker. I fell to the ground and they started to kick the shit out of me. I had to have stitches. The school kicked me out, not the bullies,” she told journalist Henry Alford.

In her own words, she was the “weird girl,” and it was thanks to Tim Burton that she learned to embrace being different. She even personally thanked the filmmaker, who was recently awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “You affirmed my voice. You reinforced my confidence to be myself, to go against the tides of conformity,” said Ryder. “Your creative inclusiveness showed me what true artistic collaboration looked like, and, in other words, you made being a weird girl not just okay, but something to celebrate and even kind of cool.”

In 2024, she is once again the epitome of cool. In the end, “Winona Forever” was a premonition of what was to come.

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