Winona Ryder recalls agencies cursing her out for declining "big movies" and remakes

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.

She went on to relay an anecdote about Sydney Pollack's 1995 remake of Sabrina, a 1954 film that originally starred Audrey Hepburn. "Of course I went on that meeting. But I was like, 'It’s Audrey Hepburn!'" she recalled, telling Esquire that the idea of remaking a classic wasn't appealing to her. (Clearly that philosophy doesn't apply, or at least has evolved, regarding her own classics, as she's reprising her role of Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice this September.) "I just remember getting yelled at [for not taking the part]," she continued. It eventually went to Julia Ormond.

But while Ryder laments that "It’s so drilled into you how disposable actresses can be, our shelf life. You hear it all the time," she seems to be learning how to set firmer boundaries from the younger generation. Just in telling her Beetlejuice Beetlejuice co-star Jenna Ortega about some of the "people who were just blatantly sexually harassing me" back in the day (she did not name names), Ryder recalled, "As I was saying it, I was like, 'Jesus Christ, that’s really fucked up.'"

When she was younger, "If someone was being inappropriate or drunkenly hitting on me it was like, 'Ha ha!'. You kind of do that. 'Ha ha!' Inappropriate? I dealt with that." Sure, she wishes the youth would actually watch some of the classic movies she used to refuse to remake. (She recently told the Los Angeles Times that she "almost wept" hearing Ortega reference I Am Cuba, a 1964 political drama from Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov). Still, watching her absorb some of their ability to put their own safety and comfort first is genuinely moving.

In a viral video from the Venice Film Festival red carpet, where Beetlejuice Beetlejuice just celebrated its premiere, Ortega can be seen telling her older co-star something reassuring when a photographer yells for her to take a photo without her sunglasses. It's unclear exactly what passed between the two women, but it looks like Ortega might have said something along the lines of "You don't have to." Whatever it was, the sunglasses stayed on.

There’s something very comforting about the younger generation encouraging the older generation (who were raised to please & say yes) to maintain their boundaries no matter what https://t.co/swaQr1OEhi

— Lauren (@laurenlamango) August 28, 2024