There’s Only One Winona Ryder

As she reprises her legendary role in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice three decades on, Winona Ryder reflects on her life on the silver screen. “You can’t shed who Lydia was, but the beauty of it is we all know what happens – life happens”

ANOTHER – This article is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine:

In 1987 a strange script about a shadow-eyed goth who prefers the company of ghosts to her parents found its way to Winona Ryder. She was a journal-writing, inky-haired 14-year-old at the time, with a Walkman full of post-punk and a love of film noir. The marble-pale misfit Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice – a carnivalesque comedy hatched from Tim Burton’s crackpot imagination – could have been written for her.

“I dressed all in black and I had this blue-black, drugstore-dyed hair. I had cut my own bangs so they were really jagged. It’s just wild how similar I looked to her,” Ryder says, Zooming from New York more than three decades later and still dressed in black: T-shirt, dungarees, Leonard Cohen baseball cap. Much like her screen performances, conversations with the singular actor don’t tend to follow well-worn grooves. Today the 52-year-old freewheels from the forthcoming US elections to 70s TV detectives, from Cher to Chernobyl – the latter propelled her to go door to door, drumming up support for the Nuclear Freeze campaign as a kid in northern California. In those days, if the aspiring actor wanted to audition, there was no money for airfare: the family had to climb into a 1969 Volvo without AC and drive seven hours from their book-filled home in Petaluma, north of San Francisco, to the soundstages of LA. “I heard later that I had this reputation for being really choosy, when in actuality we just couldn’t afford to go,” she says. “But Beetlejuice was so unusual – I zoned in on Lydia.” Young actors considered for that role included Brooke Shields, Sarah Jessica Parker, Juliette Lewis and Diane Lane. But that was before Burton met Ryder. “I remember I made my mom wait in the car because I wanted to do it alone,” she says of her first encounter with the unruly-haired auteur. “I was waiting in a side office of this Culver City studio when a young guy came in – I figured he was from the art department. We started talking about old movies and Edward Gorey’s art, and discovered we had this mutual affinity for the actor Peter Lorre. And then I was like, ‘Do you know when Tim Burton is going to show up?’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s me.’ I had no idea directors could be like this cool young person. I said, ‘God I’m sorry, do you want me to read?’ He said, ‘No, I want you to do it.’”
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