Interview: Winona Ryder
Winona Ryder thinks reading me her diaries is a dreadful idea. I beg her in the name of science, medicine and anything else I can think of. We talk it over. And over. I tell her she would be giving a gift to the readers — something pure, unfiltered, straight from the mountain spring. She tells me that hauling out those spiral notebooks would be “the cheesiest, tackiest thing in the world.” Still, she mulls it over. For weeks, she says neither yes nor no. Instead, I get the message you occasionally get from those old Magic 8 Balls: Reply Hazy, Try Again.
On New Year’s Day, Ryder calls from her place in New York, and this time the Magic 8 Ball says, incredibly, Signs Point To Yes. The 22-year-old actress lives in a gorgeous, stately apartment building in Manhattan — an ocean liner drifting through a gray and dingy neighborhood. Tonight, Ryder’s friend Kevin Haley and her boyfriend, Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum, are downstairs cooking dinner. The actress is in her bedroom, sipping tea with honey. She’s a friend among friends, a homebody at home. And there’s a stack of diaries on her bed. “I can hardly read my writing,” she says. But she does. Ryder reads an entry, from April Fools’ Day 1993, which she wrote while in Portugal, shooting Bille August’s muddled epic The House of the Spirits. At the time, she was tumbling toward the end of long-standing relationships with insomnia (five years) and Johnny Depp (four). So the first entry is as follows: “Lisbon. Yikes. Weirdness.”
And we’re off.
“I can’t believe I did that,” Ryder says, laughing, 15 minutes later. “I can’t believe I read you my journals. That’s so lame. Oh, God. Are you totally going to have a heyday with me? Are you going to crush me?”
Live and in person, Ryder is 5 feet 4 inches and weighs 103 pounds. In a corset, her waist measures 17 inches. Joanne Gardner, media coordinator for the Polly Klaas Foundation, calls Ryder “teeny-tiny.” Martin Scorsese, who directed Ryder’s revelatory turn in The Age of Innocence, refers to her as “a person of that stature.” Janeane Garofalo, who plays her roommate in Ben Stiller’s dead-on Generation X comedy Reality Bites, puts it this way: “She’s so small! I mean, she’s like a little figurine for the coffee table!”
Upon acquaintance, Ryder will charm you within an inch of your life. She’ll be geeky (“I don’t think I’d be good at trashing dressing rooms. I’d be like ‘Ouch!'”), censorious (“I can’t believe you liked that movie. I’m surprised, and I’m disappointed. I really am. I’m not kidding”), indignant (“They offered me that movie, by the way, and I wrote a very nasty letter saying, ‘How dare you?'”), then geeky once more (“I never sent it”). Still, your first impression of Ryder is simply that she is lovely and small. With her knees drawn up to her chest and her head hung low, she is a ball that could roll away at any minute. Ryder’s size clearly makes her feel vulnerable — outdoors, she walks with a hunched, defensive posture — but often she makes light of it. One afternoon, walking barefoot through the vast, chandeliered lobby of her apartment building, she turns to me and says: “All the famous models live here. I feel like a midget fuckin’ freak.”
Interview: Winona Ryder, Page 1 of 6