Winona Ryder: Ryder on the Storm

Ryder's celebrity status has now reached the level she was originally parodying: "Johnny and I flew into L.A. from Tampa where we'd been working all day, and we were really tired," she says, recounting her arrival a few days before. "We got off the plane, and about 50 paparazzi people jumped out and started taking our pictures. We couldn't, like, see where we were going because the bulbs were popping. One guy stuck out his foot and tried to trip me! They were yelling at us, trying to get an 'interesting' picture. Finally, Johnny got so mad that he turned around and flipped them off. Now you'll see his picture in a magazine and he's going to look like some asshole. Like a guy who enjoys flipping off photographers."

A lot of what Ryder is putting up with is the scene around Depp, who sent up his own teen idol status in John Waters's film Cry-Baby. The press can't seem to resist writing about his habit of getting engaged to such starlets-of-the-hour as Jennifer Grey and Sherilyn Fenn. [This has led to a rash of bumper stickers all over Manhattan reading, "Honk if you've never been engaged to Johnny Depp."] Depp has been moved to demonstrate the permanence of his affection for Ryder by having "Winona Forever" tattooed on his deltoid. Ryder tells me, "I was thrilled when he got the tattoo. Wouldn't any woman be?"

While Ryder refuses to discuss Depp's--or her own--earlier romances, she's very convincing when she says she's tired of having paparazzi cameras trained on the couple's every move. Still, according to her pal Daniel Waters, she's enjoying the celebrity trip more than she likes to let on. "There's a part of her that likes it even though she denies it," he explains. "Winona's got a real star quality, and right now she's got a Natalie Wood obsession."

It's no surprise that Ryder would be interested in the late actress who also entered show biz as a child, rocketed through teen stardom, and then managed to make the precarious leap to lasting adult fame. (Wood's Depp was Warren Beatty, and she never married him.) But she doesn't appear to be patterning her career after Wood's. Wood co-starred opposite Beatty in the mainstream love story Splendor in the Grass, from which she emerged a grownup star. Ryder's chosen to don a blonde wig and cheerleader get-up opposite a Depp buried under tons of bizarre makeup, replete with shears for fingers, in Tim (_Beetlejuice_, Batman) Burton's surreal Peter Pan-esque fantasy, Edward Scissorhands.

"Working with Johnny turned out to be really great," she says. "Of course I was scared and nervous about it. I mean, if there's one person that I want to impress with my acting, it's him. So there was a lot of insecurity during the first couple of days, but it turned out to be a really motivating situation, you know?" Her eyes get wide and seem to twinkle mischievously for a second as she adds, "I think we have pretty good chemistry. We'll see."

With or without Johnny, Edward Scissorhands, a weird, hip '90s movie, fits easily into the Ryder oeuvre. And apart from that, Tim Burton is her dream director. "Tim talks my language, you know?" she says. "Did you ever meet somebody who you can just talk to? That's how I feel about Tim Burton. We have the same sensibility; we think the same things are funny."

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