Interview: Winona Ryder
Interview no. 1 falls on a blank, gray day shortly before Christmas. Ryder has just returned from the memorial service for Polly Klaas, the 12-year-old girl who was abducted last October in the actress’s hometown, Petaluma, Calif., and found murdered two months later. Ryder arrives at the restaurant precisely on time and kisses Pirner goodbye in the street. (Later, I’ll ask if I can meet with him, and the Magic 8 Ball will deliberate for weeks.) Once inside, she sits in a corner and removes her “Holden Caulfield hat”: a plaid hunting cap with fur-lined earflaps. Her hair is startlingly short. “My mom cut my hair off,” she says. “It wasn’t my natural color, and she was like ‘Oh, honey, let me.’ Now my ears are always freezing.” She gestures at her hat. “So I need earflaps.”
Ryder seems relaxed and settled in, but the moment I turn on the tape recorder, she stares at it as if looking into oncoming headlights. Anyone about to be subjected to weeks’ worth of questions is entitled to a case of the jitters — Truman Capote referred to the movie star and the reporter as “the nervous hummingbird and its would-be captor.” And for a while, Ryder gets smaller and smaller, threatening to vanish. “I get nervous,” she says, “and when I get nervous, I get inarticulate.” She orders herbal tea and chicken soup. I ask if she remembers the first time she ever had insomnia. She looks at the tape recorder again, then takes the leap.
“I was in Memphis doing Great Balls of Fire!,” she says. “I was 16. I was sick, so I was kind of delirious, and I remember doing the weirdest thing. I took a bunch of grapefruits…. You know when you’re sick, and you have a fever? And you pick up an orange or a grapefruit, and they’re comforting because they’re cold, so you put them on your face? [X singer] John Doe was playing my dad in the movie, and he brought over a bunch of grapefruits. For vitamin C and stuff. So I put the grapefruits all over, like surrounding me in the bed. And I just laid there and tried to sleep.”
Was this Doe’s idea?
Ryder laughs. “No, no, no. It was my idea. I mean, you get bored. I remember just panicking. And the digital clock was going: 3:30! 4:30! 5:30! I stayed up the whole night. I remember — as it got light — it was just the saddest thing to me. I thought I was going to die or something. And from that night on … because I knew it could happen, it did happen.” Weeks later, I remind Ryder of the tale of the grapefruit. “Oh, God,” she groans. “Why did I tell you that story? What was my point? Hey, maybe the grapefruits gave me insomnia for five years.”
Over the next couple of weeks, Ryder will occasionally retreat into the nervous-hummingbird routine. This will take some explaining. With Heathers, which she narrated via her character’s journals, Ryder entered her generation’s circulatory system. Teenage life was twisted, and Ryder, more than any other actor or actress, was in on the joke. Since Heathers, movies like The Age of Innocence — and even Francis Ford Coppola’s overripe Bram Stoker’s Dracula — have made Ryder something more than the doyenne of Generation X. They’ve made her a movie star. Stiller says: “It’s funny — girls really like her, and guys really like her. Every guy I’ve ever talked to has a crush on her.” Garofalo says, “I’ve noticed that even little, little kids like her,” adding, “I think Winona’s the poster girl of every Trekkie, every computer nerd, every information-superhighway addict, every comedyhead and every comic-book collector. And athletes, too. You know? She’s so gorgeous that she crosses over.”
Ryder has already won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for The Age of Innocence, and this March she could win the Oscar (“Oh, shut up!”). Rumor has it that she’s being offered as much as $4 million a picture. The actress loves a period piece: In House of the Spirits, a political saga spanning four generations, she plays the defiant daughter of a conservative Latin American statesman (Jeremy Irons), and soon she’ll begin work on a new adaptation of one of Polly Klaas’ favorite books, Little Women. But Ryder’s not ditching her core audience: In the wickedly satiric Reality Bites, she plays a young, unemployable filmmaker whose young, unemployable love interest (Ethan Hawke) threatens to turn her apartment into “a den of slack.” Says Ryder, “My agent said, ‘I think you’re going to like this movie, because you can wear jeans in it.'”
Interview: Winona Ryder, Page 2 of 6