Winona Ryder recalls agencies cursing her out for declining "big movies" and remakes
Now, she realizes that some of the things she experienced as a young woman in the industry were "really fucked up"
Photo: Ernesto Ruscio/Getty Images
While some actors have been unhappily swept up in the franchise machine, Winona Ryder has consistently been choosy in the parts she’s accepted throughout her career. (She’s never even watched a Marvel film, which is not remotely surprising.) This ability to say “no” was hard won, however, especially when the actor was in her twenties and just coming off of films like Beetlejuice and Heathers.
“Things were changing. Studios were getting so much more powerful,” she said in a lengthy Esquire profile about a period in the ’90s and early 2000s when she either turned down or lost out on parts in films like The Godfather Part III, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and more. “Suddenly it wasn’t about working with Jim Jarmusch, it was all about numbers, how much things were making. It was like you were under this weird threat all the time, which felt like so much pressure. And all you ever heard was, if you take a break, you can’t come back. That was drilled into you.”
The problem was two-fold. There was “the noise around me” (the paparazzi’s obsession with her love life, etc.) which made even her feel like she “would be a distraction,” and then there was the fact that she “[felt] they started associating me with the kind of movies that they didn’t make any more,” like expensive period pieces.
When Ryder was offered a project, it was especially hard to turn it down. “Those big movies, you have an entire agency yelling at you to do it. I remember leaving agencies because they would scream at me [when she was reluctant to take a role in a big commercial film], ‘Are you fucking kidding? Who the fuck do you think you are?'” she said.