At the height of her fame in the nineties and noughties, veteran actress Winona Ryder said she missed out on “a lot of parts,” including a starring role in the Charlie Kaufman cerebral romantic drama Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (which went to Kate Winslet), due to excessive tabloid and paparazzi attention.
“It was such a brilliant script and [director Michel Gondry and I] were at this little restaurant and people kept coming up to me and there was a random paparazzi guy outside, which was kind of unusual for me, but I just remember [Gondry’s] face, and trying to convince him that this isn’t normal, and I know it’s not normal,” she said in a recent cover story with Esquire.
The casting meeting was just one of many opportunities the two-time Oscar nominee said she lost out on because of a media circus surrounding her personal life, including her romantic relationships, mental health and shoplifting incident.
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“There was baggage,” Ryder explained. “Trying to convince someone to ignore the noise around me was tough. I saw it in their eyes. I lost a lot of parts because of that.”
Not only did the Stranger Things star receive feedback that her overwhelming fame would detract from her performance in a film, but also that there were increasingly narrowing options for what movies were available to her, due to Hollywood ageism and increasing studio power.
“I’m not in any way complaining,” she said. “But there was this whole time when I felt like I would be a distraction, as well. I got it. Certainly, in the 1990s, I became aware of that. And there was a switching-of-the-guard feeling, too. As you get older there are these new, younger actresses. It’s so drilled into you how disposable actresses can be, our shelf life. You hear it all the time.”
She added, “Things were changing. Studios were getting so much more powerful. 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.”
Ryder, who is currently filming the fifth and final season of the hit supernatural coming-of-age Netflix series Stranger Things, will reappear on the silver screen as the character that launched her into stardom, that of Beetlejuice‘s goth angsty teen Lydia — now grown up with a moody daughter of her own in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, portrayed by Jenna Ortega. Her most well-known credits include Edward Scissorhands, Heathers, Black Swan, The Age of Innocence, Reality Bites, Little Women, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Girl, Interrupted.
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