Winona Ryder: 'I Started My Career As The Youngest And I Always Wanted To Be Older'

Elle

2 days ago

PHOTOGRAPHS BY OLIVIA MALONE, STYLING BY NATASHA WRAY
Actors famously hate talking about relationships, but I plunge in anyway and ask Winona Ryder about her relationship with her hair.
'My hair?' she asks.
We're having lunch in a café on a bright, blue day in a leafy part of Los Angeles. Ryder is wearing denim overalls, a T-shirt from the Beat Generation holy land that is San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore, a pin with Jim Jarmusch's face on it and Converse high-tops as yellow as the sun in a kid's drawing. Her hair – loose, shaggy, falling past her shoulders – is her natural deep-brown with just a few silver stands, like tinsel. She has ordered tea with milk and sugar and a chocolate croissant, which she is eating in the only rational way: by tearing it apart in search of the chocolate.
'Honestly, I always loved having short hair,' she says. 'One thing is, I have to cut it myself.'
All those iconic pixie cuts in the 1990s? She did that? 'Always. It's easy. And for Reality Bites , I just went like this…' OLIVIA MALONE
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Ryder lowers her head, puts her hands behind her back, and pretends to be chopping away. 'Upside down and you cut up,' she says. She rights herself and the mood shifts slightly. 'I always knew I looked young,' Ryder says. 'But I also knew that when I started ageing, it was gonna happen fast.'
I state the obvious – that it hasn't happened yet.
'It kind of has,' she says, and points to her forehead. 'I don't mind it. But what's weird is when you're surrounded by young women getting weird shit done.' She's talking about buccal-fat removal, during which, yes, fat is sucked out of the cheeks with a vacuum. 'I thought they were kidding. I want to say, like, 'In 10 years, you're gonna want that back!'' OLIVIA MALONE
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Lately, female directors have made it clear they think Ryder would benefit from some Botox: 'They'll say, 'Just relax your forehead. Relax.' I'm trying to be a great actor, and they're saying that over and over. It's nice that people are talking about how it's OK to age, but there's still enormous pressure. Every role I get is for a mother, you know? My career has definitely shifted.'
Ryder smiles, unphased by all this. She seems to wear the pressure of ageing like a sundress. 'So, I think what I aspire to, finally, is to play the judge who's like, 'Chambers now, counsellor! Too far!'' She rises slightly from her seat to deliver the line and booms it out giddily. OLIVIA MALONE
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I first interviewed Ryder for a cover story when she was 19 (before Mermaids and Edward Scissorhands hit cinemas) and again when she was 22 (ahead of Reality Bites ). She was bright-eyed and impassioned in those days, and en route to being an icon, thanks to the fact that she was clearly in on the dark joke that was growing up.
Even then, Ryder didn't hide the fact that she'd dealt with anxiety, heartbreak, intermittent self-loathing around stardom and literal years of insomnia. (It's not by random chance that she helped Girl, Interrupted get made.) Often, this shadowy stuff manifested as humour. In 1994, as the 5'3' actor padded barefoot through the chandeliered lobby of her Manhattan apartment building, she told me, casually: 'All the famous models live here. I feel like a tiny f*ckin' freak.' I say all this because I never saw Ryder as happy and at ease as she is now. I'd only add two caveats. One is that the US government is currently a hellmouth. The other is that Ryder – the proud daughter of counter-culture writers and activists, who learnt not long ago that she was actually conceived in the City Lights Bookstore after closing time – recently became acquainted with tear gas while protesting deportation raids in LA. OLIVIA MALONE
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Some of Ryder's equanimity has to do with locating the love of her life, the green-fashion entrepreneur Scott Mackinlay Hahn. (When they met at the Black Swan premiere in 2010, Hahn mistook her for Milla Jovovich. 'I thought it was the most charming thing in the world,' Ryder says – so, later, she chased down his phone number. 'I was very direct. I was like, 'Listen, do you want to go on a date?''') Some of her happiness has to do with playing Joyce Byers on the Duffer brothers' colossally popular sci-fi/horror hit Stranger Things , which ends this autumn. When she signed on for the show, the deeply non-techy Ryder only dimly understood what Netflix was. In a series about parallel universes, she was the one who insisted on more than one dimension for her character, who struggles to reclaim her younger son from the mouldering nether-world known as the Upside Down. 'I had to fight really hard to make Joyce real and flawed,' she tells me. The Duffers admit she was just 'the mom', and it's tough to convince people that flaws are good.
The coolest part of Stranger Things , though, seems to have been getting to know the young cast. 'I was the oldest person on the set,' she says. 'I started [my career] as the youngest, and I always wanted to be older.' So, when Stranger Things became a smash, Ryder helped the teens keep it all in perspective. 'I was like, 'This doesn't happen. This is weird – the phenomenon. The work is the gift. That is why you're doing it.'' Which was what was instilled in me. And I think I was successful with some of them.' Ryder also told the cast to remember their own value. 'I've been trying to sort of change this narrative with the kids, because they have it drilled into them that they're so lucky and, you know, that this show 'made' them. I'm like, 'No. Netflix is so lucky. You guys are the special ones. Like, you guys are magic.'' OLIVIA MALONE
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Over lunch, Ryder – who's known as Noni to her friends – shouts out the many mentors she herself had, most vociferously Laura Dern. 'I don't think I'd be here without her,' she says. 'I met her on my first screen test for Lucas – I didn't know what a screen test was. I remember walking in, and River Phoenix held the door open for me. I was like, 'Oh, that's so nice.' I recognised him from Stand By Me , and he had broken his leg. Laura was there to read for the older girl, and she talked me through it, 'cause I didn't know what the f*ck was going on. She befriended me. I was literally 12 and – nobody knows this – she took me under her wing into my twenties. That relationship got me through. I was probably living at her house when I was talking to you [in the Nineties].'
Ryder's star rose fast. Her first Oscar nomination, for The Age of Innocence , came when she was 22; her second, for Little Women , when she was 23. Even The Crucible , which floundered at the box office, was riveting. Still, Ryder has been pressured by people, just like her Stranger Things castmates. 'I was told I was never gonna work again if I did Heathers ,' she says, admitting: 'I did lose a job.' She's not sure she wants to reveal what job it was. I point out that it was 35 years ago. 'OK, OK, I'll tell you. You remember the movie The Freshman ?' Yes: the comedy with Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick. Ryder had landed the role, but then the film-makers saw Heathers . 'They thought it was making fun of teen suicide. They were deeply offended and, yeah, they revoked the offer.' She affects a weepy voice: 'I'm like, 'I can't work with Marlon Brando?' But I had to stand my ground. I wasn't gonna apologise.' Later, I ask if she ever watches her old movies, and she says: 'I never turn off Heathers if it's on. I know it basically by heart.' OLIVIA MALONE
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Ryder has experienced much more difficult stuff in Hollywood, too. She remembers telling the producers of a movie that the director was being inappropriate with her and asking if they could talk to him. 'The next day I had a big scene,' she says. The director approached her on set to discuss said scene, then changed his tone to a whisper. 'He came up to me, and he was like, 'OK, so, um, if we just try it like – you f*cking c*nt, I'm gonna destroy your f*cking life.' OK? So let's just do it like that?' And I had to f*cking act. And what's so crazy is my brother was working as a PA on the movie, and I didn't even tell him, and I didn't complain.'
Two years ago, Ryder told that anecdote to Jenna Ortega, Michael Keaton and Catherine O'Hara while shooting Beetlejuice Beetlejuice . 'I was almost telling it like it was this funny story,' she says. 'Then I'm looking at Jenna's face and imagining it happening to her. It wasn't until that moment that I was like, 'Oh my God, this is bad.'' OLIVIA MALONE
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For every unsettling tale, Ryder fortunately has 10 ecstatic ones, and she waves her arms around when she tells them, like an air-traffic controller at the aiport guiding a plane into its gate. She seems happiest when she's lampooning herself – she tells me that she was once so besotted with Christopher Walken that when he gave her a rotisserie chicken – from a supermarket – she kept the carcass a weirdly long time because it came from him. Later, I will text Ryder to make sure that I understand this saga correctly. She writes back: 'I still have the wishbone and am trying to make it into a necklace.'
At the café, Ryder also relates the following adventure in humiliation while beaming: 'I was absolutely in love with Al Pacino when I was working with him. We were doing that workshop for Richard III , which I didn't know was gonna be a movie. I was actively in love with him. He was obsessed with coffee, and he would take me all over New York – like, to the weirdest places – to try different coffees. I'm 22, or whatever. Finally, he's dropping me off wherever I'm staying, and I'm like, 'I love you, you know. I really am completely in love with you.'' And he was like – she pretends to be Pacino reaching out to touch her hand pityingly – 'Aw, honey, noooo.' Then, like 10 years later, I meet his girlfriend, who's younger than me.' She laughs. 'Dude, I'm f*cking throwing myself at you.' Ryder pauses, then puts a bow on the story: 'I still play poker with him sometimes. It's the best.' OLIVIA MALONE
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How can she share these memories so freely and easily? Well, she's found Hahn, the aforementioned love of her life. I ask her if she ever considered having children – she clearly has maternal feelings for the Stranger Things cast – and she says simply: 'There was a time that I was really thinking about it, but I hadn't met Scott.'
Hahn arrives at the cafe towards the end of lunch. He has a soft, welcoming face currently engulfed by a mountain-man beard and, where Ryder is concerned, he just about glows with care and protectiveness. A few days later, I follow up to ask Ryder how Hahn would like his life's calling described, and I'll get this answer: 'Ecological warrior/diplomat by day, Noni whisperer by night.' Ryder says she already thinks of him as her husband, and the couple plan to marry before long. She was 'never the girl who dreamt of a wedding', so I point out that they could get married at City Lights Bookstore. Ryder stops short: 'Wow, that is such a good idea.' OLIVIA MALONE
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I ask Ryder and Hahn if they're homebodies. 'We're homebodies when it comes to food,' Hahn says. He does the cooking because she doesn't think she's great at it, and, as she puts it: 'He has this gift that my mom had, which is making healthy food delicious. He made a curry last night that was better than any curry I've ever had.'
As for their day-to-day life, Ryder says she loves the band Saint Etienne but admits that the music most likely to be drifting through their house is stuff that's been nesting in her heart forever: Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and The Replacements. She loathes AI and avoids social media but consumes movies and books like they're not just entertainment, but sustenance (she loves many writers, including Zadie Smith, Isabel Allende, Alice Walker and Philip Roth). At one point in the interview, she surprises me by reaching forward to touch the notebook paper I've written questions on. When I tell her that she's not allowed to read them, she says, 'No, no, no. I'm just excited to see paper.' OLIVIA MALONE
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Ryder says she likes to read during daylight hours and, when I ask where in the house she reads, she paints a picture that will stay with me. 'There's a little brick room that's lit by the sun, which looks out over David Lynch's house,' she says, pausing mournfully when she mentions the late director. 'I usually read until it gets dark. I've always done that.' Ryder knows a book is good when she doesn't want night to fall, which reminds me of how she has always lived a bit out of step with time. 'I remember when I first read American Pastoral – this was so long ago – I was, like, panicking as the sun was going down,' she says. She mimes clutching a book and reading feverishly before it's too late. 'Why I didn't just turn the light on, I still don't know.'
HAIR: John D at Forward Artists. MAKE-UP: Francelle Daly at 2b Management, using Love+Craft+Beauty. NAILS: Yoko Sakakura at A-Frame Agency, using Spa Ritual and Orly. STYLIST'S ASSISTANTS: Marissa Pérez, Harry Langford and Crystalle Cox. SET DESIGN: Maxim Jezek at Walter Schupfer Management. ON-SET PRODUCTION: Fox & Leopard
OLIVIA MALONE
OLIVIA MALONE
This interview is taken from the September issue of ELLE UK, on newsstands from July 31.
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