Winona Ryder revealed how working on 1988’s comedy horror hit affected her life off-screen in a recent chat with Esquire for the upcoming ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.’
“I felt like I was me,” she noted about joining the cast. “I wasn’t trying to be something else.” That’s a huge moment for a teenager. It really helped define me.
But the film’s success didn’t help with the bullying at school. “I remember thinking that it was going to, like, change my status and it made it worse,” the actress recalled. “They were like, ‘You’re a witch! You’re a freak!’ It amplified it. I was like, ‘But I’m in a movie!’”
Ryder was only 15 when she played Lydia, the teenage daughter of the Deetz family who ended up befriending the ghosts in her new home. Luckily, her experience on set was different from school.
“Michael, [Keaton] was so gentle with me. And Catherine, [O’Hara]. They always included me. They were so kind and so thoughtful,” she shared.
“It was unique because as a kid actor you don’t always get that. It’s about the adults. It truly was the first time I ever felt like I collaborated on a movie. And I really had a connection with Tim. I remember going on to other movies and it was not like that. People weren’t so kind. It was much rougher.”
Winona Ryder recently returned to play Lydia again, now as an adult who is a famous TV personality. She starred alongside Jenna Ortega as her daughter Astrid and Justin Theroux as her husband Rory.
“There were a lot of times when I was, you know, I had sort of gotten my hopes up and, but there was never, I felt like it was sort of this kismet fate because I, I realized that we had to wait for Jenna to be born and grow up and be like the perfect because she really just fit, she sort of completed this puzzle, you know,” she told ComicBook about her co-stars. “And she was such an amazing addition, as was Justin [Theroux] and Willem [Dafoe] and Monica [Bellucci]. I mean, it’s like a dream cast.”
‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ is set to hit theaters on September 6.
