Winona Ryder: Ryder on the Storm

We enter the cool marble lobby of the hotel, and the actress looks around as if she's inspecting the place for the first time. She asks me where the restaurant is. "I thought you'd been here before," I say. "I was told you wanted to have tea here." She shakes her head no and admits, with a laugh, that she has never before set foot in the place. "Actually, I wanted to do the interview at Barney's Beanery," she says, referring to a West Hollywood greasy spoon favored by young celebrities and rock stars, "so that we could play pool while we talk."

Sitting down in the nearly empty restaurant, Ryder orders tea, and acknowledges that "all of these interviews, and photo sessions, and stuff" can be "a drag." In fact, she recently moved, with Depp, from Hollywood to Manhattan to escape the publicity machine. "Every move I made here was being documented," she says, leaning closer for emphasis. My eyes fall momentarily to the great big rock of a diamond resting in the setting of her engagement ring. "If I drove down the street in my car, people stared. If I went out to eat, it was written about the next day. Everyone knew where I was going, everyone knew where I had been. It was, like, everyone knew my schedule. Everyone I met here was in the industry. They were all scamming each other. And even if they were nice and genuine, I'd think that maybe it was because they wanted to use me for something. Maybe they wanted me to be in their movie, or they thought I could get them into a restaurant. It wasn't real life to me. It was, like, living in a magazine or something."

Ask Ryder a question, and she goes off like a cannon. Spicing her speech with lots of "you knows" and "likes", she bounds from one topic to the next, seeming far more like an endearing, earnest teenager who says whatever pops into her head than a seasoned, worldly movie star with a famous boyfriend, a clutch of handlers, and several big movies waiting in the wings.

She loves to talk about Heathers, the surreal black comedy about homicide and suicide in a high-school-from-hell that wasn't a hit but turned her into one of the hippest young actors in the business. "Heathers is the most amazing piece of literature ever. It's one of those things that you take out and read every year. Dan Waters told me that he listened to the Replacements and the Cocteau Twins while he wrote Heathers. You can tell that when you read the script. It becomes really obvious." She pauses--I can't guess what she is thinking--then adds, "I wonder if Paul Westerberg ever saw Heathers. God, the Replacements are so great." She goes on to tell me that she tried to get the title of the Heathers theme song, "Que Sera, Sera," tattooed on her body. "I got proofed in the tattoo parlor," she says with a wicked grin. "The guy wouldn't do it because I was too young."

I bring up all the changes she's been through since the days of Heathers (hardly more than a year ago), and Ryder admits, "Between falling in love and making movies, things have been very hectic. The last year's been, like, a nightmare."

At the very least, it's been a strange year. In the spring of 1989, she was spoofing the whole Hollywood fame game. At an early screening of Heathers, she and co-star Christian Slater told the audience that they had just gotten married. "In Vegas," Winona added, holding tight to Slater's hand. A few days later, she gleefully told a Rolling Stone reporter about the scam romance and joked about how she and Slater wanted to parody the cliched Hollywood celebrity couple: to stage fights in restaurants, act reclusive but leak information anyway, harass photographers.

But Hollywood has a way of co-opting everyone--even satirical young hipsters. And so not very long after Ryder's exuberant put-on, she fell for real for TV's pouty heartthrob Johnny Depp. And suddenly People Magazine named Johnny and Winona the King and Queen of Young Hollywood--and the two of them were participating in a National Association of Theater Owners-sponsored salute to the Young Stars of Tomorrow. "In Vegas," Ryder says, hip to the irony of her situation. "It was the whole Holly-wood thing," she adds, curling her upper lip distastefully. "We flew to Vegas in a private plane and Johnny got to shake Wayne Newton's hand. He was so excited, he couldn't stop talking about it."

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