Winona Ryder Covers the HARPER’S BAZAAR August 2024 Performance Issue photographed by Liv Liberg and styled by Vanessa Reid.
She discusses revisiting BEETLEJUICE for the movie’s sequel, sticking it out in Hollywood and staying off of social media.
On reprising her character, Lydia Deetz, for the upcoming sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in which she is now a pill-popping, middle-aged woman: “I felt bad for her,” she explains.
On how parts of the Lydia Deetz character remind Ryder of a younger version of herself:
“In my 30s, I had two disastrous relationships that were—they weren’t wrong, but this was before you would ever think to Google someone,” she says. “When I look back, I’m like, ‘What the hell was I thinking?’ I was dating the type of person who only lets you know a few weeks in that they’re in a relationship with someone else. And you’re just like, ‘What the fuck?’ ”
On reading through her diaries from that period of her life: “You clearly write when you’re depressed or upset. I tend to not write when I’m really happy,” she says. “I was going through them and just asking myself, ‘How?’ I was clearly trying to deal with …” Ryder trails off. “It was very sad. I was clearly trying to believe the best and to give grace to myself. But I was taking care of everything but myself.”
On her style evolution, habituating more of an elder-stateswoman role, refusing to wear heels on the red carpet and styling herself:
“I actually made a conscious decision, maybe six years ago maybe six years ago,” she says. The Winona Book, published last year by Idea Books, features candid Polaroids of her by Robert Rich, the former vice president of public relations for Marc Jacobs, who became her close friend and whose basement office below the Marc Jacobs store in New York’s SoHo neighborhood was a haven for celebrities looking to remain undetected. The book achieved a cultlike status and sells for up to $300 on eBay.”
On her current partner of 14 years, Scott Mackinlay Hahn, founder of the sustainable organic-cotton company, Loomstate:
“He’s so great. He really is. I’m really lucky,” Ryder says.
On her first meeting with Tim Burton: “I was sitting there, and this guy came in holding a folder, who I thought was a messenger or something. We started talking about Edward Gorey. About half an hour into this conversation, I feel like I’m making a friend, and I ask him, ‘Do you know Tim Burton? This is his office, right?’ And he went, ‘Well, that’s me.’ I didn’t know that directors could look like Tim. He was 27. Immediately, I was like, ‘Oh, sh*t. I’m sorry. Do you want me to read?’ He told me no. I remember feeling like ‘Oh, God, did I blow it?’ I had this fear when I got up to leave, and I was like, ‘Hey, man, it was really great meeting you. Good luck, this sounds really great.’ I added, ‘If you want, I can come back.’ But he told me that he wanted me to do it. That had never happened. I’d never been offered a part without a reading for it or on the spot like that, ever.”
On the 1999 archival Givenchy dress designed by Alexander McQueen, in which Kendall Jenner claimed she was the “first human to ever wear it” at the 2024 Met Gala. (Photographs subsequently then circulated online of Ryder wearing the dress the same year it was designed in a photo shoot for Flaunt magazine): “I heard about that,” Ryder says when I ask her about it. “I do remember that photo shoot. It was with my dear friend [and makeup artist] Kevyn Aucoin,” she says. “And I did wear it. I have pictures. The photographer gave me some prints. I’m in a tartan in one of them, and I’m in that dress.”
On whether she developed PTSD from her early days of being in the spotlight: “The answer would be no,” she wrote back the next day. “I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to live this life—however intense and overwhelming it got, it’s NOTHING compared to what it is now with the internet and social media. I just find myself feeling tremendous empathy toward people who have sacrificed so much.”
[Photo Credit: Liv Liberg for Harper’s Bazaar Magazine]
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