What You Never Knew About Winona Ryder

In the 1980s and 1990s, Winona Ryder dominated the screen, showcasing her talent in a range of cult classics, Oscar-nominated dramas, and striking period pieces. For contemporary audiences, she is most recognized for her iconic role as Joyce Byers, the devoted and tough-as-nails mother in Netflix's Stranger Things.

Her latest movie Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — the sequel to Tim Burton’s macabre 1980s classic — has put the actress back in the spotlight, captivating audiences and reigniting the magic of her legendary career.

Her real name is Winona Laura Horowitz.

Ryder reportedly changed her name on the set of the high school drama Lucas.

When someone asked how she would like her name to appear in movie credits, Mitch Ryder’s album was playing in the background at the same time, and the inspiration struck.

She almost drowned at 12 years old

When Ryder was 12 years old, she suffered a near-drowning incident in a lake near her home. "When they pulled me out of the water, I didn't have a pulse," she told the Hartford Courant.

Years later, Ryder filmed a sequence in Alien: Resurrection that required her to go underwater for the first time since her incident. This experience was undeniably one of the most stressful moments of her career.

"I was pretty close to wishing I were on a different planet then — I mean that was really hard. That tank stuff was some of the hardest stuff I've ever had to do in my life. I mean [there] was a couple of near-death experiences, definitely, for many of us," she explained in an interview with Bobbie Wygant at the time.

She grew up in the spotlight

Winona Ryder was only 15 years old when she starred in the film that launched her career: Tim Burton's Beetlejuice, released in 1988. Interestingly, she beat out a notable list of actresses for the role, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Brooke Shields, Molly Ringwald, Juliette Lewis, Jennifer Connelly, and Alyssa Milano.

The film, her third following noteworthy supporting roles in 1986’s Lucas and 1987’s Square Dance, propelled Ryder to stardom and firmly established her as the definitive queen of ’90s angst.

“Actually, if you think about it, I don’t think I would be an actress if Beetlejuice hadn’t come along, because I really wasn’t thriving in those auditions. I’d just done a couple things, but I had black hair and was very pale and that movie led to other things,” she said.

Ryder shared the pressure she faced working in Hollywood at a young age, emphasizing that she couldn't take breaks like her peers.

"I was going through adolescence on screen," she said while speaking to The New York Times. "I mean, most kids can have a bad day and miss school, but I couldn't miss a day of work because that would be a $300,000 insurance day, blah, blah, blah."

She was constantly bullied in school

Ryder said she faced bullying as a child and thought acting would make her school life easier. Instead, it made the bullying worse. In a 2017 interview with People, she explained that bullies targeted her because of her short hair, small frame, and the boy's clothes she wore.

"I was wearing an old Salvation Army shop boy's suit," Ryder told her biographer, Nigel Goodall, for the book, Winona Ryder: The Biography.

"As I went to the bathroom I heard people saying, 'Hey, f*ggot [a homophobic slur].' They slammed my head into a locker. I fell to the ground and they started to kick the s**t out of me. I had to have stitches."

After Beetlejuice, Ryder thought starring in the blockbuster movie would end the bullying she endured at school.

“I remember thinking, ‘Ooh, it’s, like, the number-one movie. This is going to make things great at school,” she told Marie Claire U.K.

"They were like, 'You’re a witch! You’re a freak!' It amplified it. I was like, 'But I’m in a movie!'"(Via Esquire UK)

Years later, after she's become a major star, Ryder had the chance to redeem herself against one of her attackers. Ryder shared this with New York Magazine:

“Years later, I went to a coffee shop in Petaluma, and I ran into one of the girls who’d kicked me, and she said, “Winona, Winona, can I have your autograph?” and I said, “Do you remember me? I went to Kenilworth. Remember how, in seventh grade, you beat up that kid?” and she said, “Kind of,” and I said, “That was me. Go f— yourself!”

She checked into a psychiatric ward due to depression and anxiety

In the 1990s, Winona Ryder opened up about her mental health struggles. She dealt with anxiety attacks and had to leave "The Godfather Part III" after checking into a mental health facility for help. She recalled the hospital as a " very bare sort of stark place where they take everything away from you."

The New York Times describes her experience in the psychiatric ward:

“Her brief stay in a psychiatric ward when she was 20 is still a vivid memory. ‘I was overworked and overtired — too tired to sleep,’ she recalls. ‘I was in a really bad state.’ The insomnia and anxiety attacks she had been suffering on and off for years had become paralyzing. At the tail end of a long, difficult parting with her first serious boyfriend (she had left home to move in with Mr. Depp when she was 17), she ‘hit bottom,’ she says, and checked herself into a hospital. She signed herself out a week later, feeling she had not been helped.”

In 1999, Ryder spoke openly about dealing with depression during an interview with Diane Sawyer on "20/20."

The actor explained, "I saw myself on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine and it said something like 'Winona Ryder: the luckiest girl in the world.' And it broke my heart because there I was, you know, in so much pain and feeling so confused, feeling so lost in my life."

She's an insomniac

Ryder has battled chronic insomnia. On most nights, to combat the boredom, she often calls fellow insomniac Al Pacino. She told W magazine:

We talk in the middle of the night. I don't sleep; he doesn't sleep. So it is very normal that we call each other at 2 in the morning. I just love him so much.

Ryder reportedly once went to a neurologist in New York, to find out what was keeping her up.

“He said, ‘Look at your life. It’s so strange. People stare at you, strangers know who you are, you pretend to be other people for a living. It’s normal that you get anxious at times, that you’re an insomniac.”

She was a huge ’90s movie star.

If you weren't around in the '80s and '90s, you might know Winona Ryder best as Joyce Byers in Netflix's supernatural horror series Stranger Things.

However, she made her mark earlier with memorable roles in iconic films like Beetlejuice, Girl, Interrupted, and Edward Scissorhands.

Winona Ryder had a successful run in the early 1990s, earning Oscar nominations for The Age of Innocence and Little Women. She also starred in the cult classic Reality Bites, directed by Ben Stiller.

Winona Ryder's agent begged her not to do Heathers

One of Ryder’s most famous roles was her portrayal of Veronica Sawyer, the intelligent newbie to the group of Westerberg High’s most elite crowd “the Heathers.”

When Winona received word that she had been awarded the role in the independent, soon-to-be cult classic, her agent begged her to reconsider taking the part as it would be career suicide.

She revealed in a video for Harper’s Bazaar: “My agent at the time literally got on her knees and begged me not to do [the movie]. She had her hands together, and she goes, ‘You will never. Work. Again.’”

“But I actually did lose a job right when it was coming out. I had been cast in a movie, and the director took great offense to it,” she noted, adding: “I think I made the right call.”

The film, much like Mean Girls in the 2000s, reached cult status in the years after its release.

She was told she wasn't pretty enough for movies

Ryder reportedly struggled to secure her role in Heathers because they didn't consider her pretty enough.

She's also revealed how she was told she wasn't pretty during an audition. "I remember one time in particular," said Ryder while sitting down with Interview. "I was in the middle of auditioning, and I was mid-sentence when the casting director said, 'Listen, kid. You should not be an actress. You are not pretty enough.'"

About Heathers, the actress, who starred just months earlier in Beetlejuice, said she went to a Macy’s across the street for a makeover.

“I went back and I was like, ‘You don’t have to pay me, I just want to say these words,’” Ryder said, sharing that she was, indeed, not paid very much.

The Duffer brothers went all out to get Winona Ryder for Stranger Things

During a conference call interview with co-creators Matt and Ross Duffer, as well as director and executive producer Shawn Levy, it was revealed that Stranger Things casting director Carmen Cuba “first idea for the show was Winona Ryder.”

While speaking to Krista Smith in an episode of the podcast Skip Intro, Matt and Ross Duffer revealed that Ryder’s contributions actually run so deep that, without her, some of the show’s most famous plot points wouldn’t exist.

“Joyce wasn’t that interesting of a character until we cast Winona,” Matt Duffer says. “She’s such a unique actress that we wanted to lean into her skill set. So she became Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters [of the Third Kind] , and that’s where we came up with all the Christmas light stuff. I don’t know if any of that would have existed had Winona said no to the role.”

The brothers revealed they pulled out all the stops to convince her to join the show.

“Seven years ago, Winona wasn’t acting in a lot,” Matt says. “She’s one of those actors that we all grew up [watching] and that we all loved and had so much nostalgia for, and I missed her on screen. We were all worried whether she would agree to do television. Ross and I had had one movie that was not even released by Warner Brothers, so it’s not like we were a hot commodity.”

“We sent her this pitch document that we made that had some pretty pictures in it that had E.T. and Jaws and all the John Carpenter [films] that tried to capture the aesthetic of the show,” Matt continues. “We sent her a fake trailer for how the show would feel. We sent her the script, and then had like a four-and-a-half-hour meeting with her, which was just — it was hard to even speak because you’re sitting next to Winona Ryder and trying to be cool.”

Since appearing in the show, Winona Ryder reveals there's one question she gets asked a lot.( Via The Cut)

Ryder stated, "I'm getting asked a lot, 'You don't have kids, so how do you know how to act like a mother?" She then explained how she connects with her character, saying, "I know nothing could compare, and I haven't had that experience, but when my niece was born, I felt like I would jump in front of a car and die for this little person I didn't even know yet."

Ryder also revealed she felt like the confused older person on the Stranger Things set, recalling an occasion she mistook the Snapchat messaging app for some kind of snack: : ‘“Snack chat? Give me a piece of that!” I’m like the confused older person [on the set].’(Via Marie Claire)

Winona Ryder introduced Christian Bale to his wife

Years before Ryder became a star on Netflix, she appeared in the acclaimed 1994 adaptation of Little Women with Christian Bale. She brought her personal assistant, Sibi Blažić, to the film set.

While Blažić was working for Ryder on the set of Little Women, she met Christian Bale. Blažić and Bale would eventually fall in love with each other, they got married, and they have been together for more than twenty years now.

She had a fling with Matt Damon

In 1997, Winona was introduced to Matt Damon by her former BFF and flatmate Gwyneth Paltrow who was then dating Damon’s bestie, Ben Affleck). The two soon began dating shortly after but called it quits in 2000.

In 2009, Ryder commented during an interview with Black Book magazine, “Matt couldn’t be a greater, nicer guy. I’m really lucky that I’m on good terms with him.”

She was arrested for shoplifting

In 2001, Winona Ryder was caught shoplifting over $5,000 worth of items from a Saks Fifth Avenue store. She was also in possession of eight pharmaceutical drugs including Demerol, Vicodin and Percodan. She was sentenced to three years’ probation, drug counseling and 480 hours of community service.

Ryder open up to Porter magazine, revealing the incident push her to finally take a much needed break from Hollywood.

“Psychologically, I must have been at a place where I just wanted to stop,” she told Porter.  I won’t get into what happened, but it wasn’t what people think,” Winona said. “And it wasn’t like the crime of the century! But it allowed me time that I really needed, where I went back to San Francisco and got back into things that… I just had other interests, frankly.”

She had a huge falling out with Gwyneth Paltrow.

In the ‘90s, Winona Ryder and Gwyneth Paltrow were inseparable, often holding hands on red carpets and strolling through New York with their arms around each other. They shared cigarettes at Hollywood parties, flaunting matching pixie cuts and identical shoes.

In 1998, rumors suggested that Gwyneth Paltrow ruined her friendship with Winona Ryder by allegedly taking the key role of Viola de Lesseps in "Shakespeare in Love," which earned Paltrow an Academy Award for Best Actress. It is said that Paltrow found the script while visiting Ryder's house.

Winona Ryder's co-stars refused to insult her

When Ryder was cast in Francis Ford Coppola's movie "Bram Stoker's Dracula" in 1992, she revealed she didn't have the best experience on set.

In a 2020 interview with The Times, Ryder revealed that while filming a scene that required her to be upset, director Sofia Coppola tried to provoke her by yelling insults, including calling her a "whore."

As Ryder explained, "To put it in context I'm supposed to be crying. 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. ... It just didn't work."

She once dated Johnny Depp

Winona Ryder's headline-making relationship with Johnny Depp began in 1989. Within five months, an 18-year-old Ryder and 27-year-old Depp were engaged and co-starred in Tim Burton's Edward Scissorands. The Cry Baby actor even famously got a tattoo on his arm that read "Winona Forever,“ telling Rolling Stone at the time:

"There's been nothing ever throughout my 27 years that's comparable to the feeling I have with Winona."

The pair got engaged in 1990, but ended things after 3 years. Despite their breakup, Johnny and Winona have remained close. Winona even defended Johnny against abuse allegations in a witness statement in 2020.

Ryder describes her relationship with the Sweeney Todd actor, admitting that he was her first “everything.” 

“When I met Johnny, I was a pure virgin. He changed that. He was my first everything. My first real kiss. First real boyfriend. My first fiance. The first guy I had sex with. So he’ll always be in my heart. Forever… Kind of funny that word.”

Winona Ryder's experience with stalkers

Winona Ryder once spoke

about an unnerving experience in which a stalker repeatedly appeared as an extra on her films.

"Yeah. I did. I had a few (stalkers). One was really nice. He kept showing up as an extra on movies, and you don't know. You have to be careful. So, I told the director, because he was kind of creepy," Ryder said.

The actress said that the stalker later transferred his affections to Alyssa Milano.

"I got this letter in my trailer the next day that was like, 'I was just trying to get work as an extra! Just so you know, I'm not even obsessed with you anymore, I'm obsessed with Alyssa Milano now!'" she said.

She received a star on Hollywood Walk of Fame on October 6, 2000.

In 2000, Winona Ryder received a star on the Walk of Fame, honoring her acting achievements. Despite her successes, this tribute surprised her.

During the star ceremony, she told reporters “When I hear about this, I thought it was a joke… [it] gives me a chance to say you can walk all over me.”