Winona Ryder on Stranger Things, Beetlejuice and Her Longterm Boyfriend

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There’s this part of me that’s very private.

Ryder has kept her own personal life mostly out of view. But she does hint that her breakup with Depp in the early ’90s and the ferociousness of Hollywood culture at the time made life far darker for her than anyone knew. “That was my Girl, Interrupted real life,” Ryder says, referring to the 1999 film she executive produced and starred in about a young woman in a psychiatric hospital, for which Angelina Jolie won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. “I remember, I was playing this character who ends up getting tortured in a Chilean prison [in the 1994 drama The House of the Spirits],” says Ryder, who credits “an incredible therapist” for encouraging her to imagine being gentle to a younger version of herself. “I would look at these fake bruises and cuts on my face [from the shoot], and I would struggle to see myself as this little girl. ‘Would you be treating this girl like you’re treating yourself?’ I remember looking at myself and saying, ‘This is what I’m doing to myself inside.’ Because I just wasn’t taking care of myself.”

Ryder says that one of her costars in 1993’s The Age of Innocence, Michelle Pfeiffer, supported her when she was struggling, reminding her that everything confusing and unhinged about her reality would fade away and life would eventually feel normal again. “I remember Michelle being like, ‘This is going to pass.’ But I couldn’t hear it.”

“I’ve never talked about it,” Ryder says. “There’s this part of me that’s very private. I have such, like, a place in my heart for those days. But for someone younger who grew up with social media, it’s hard to describe.”

But the cruelest tabloid circus descended in 2001, after Ryder was arrested for shoplifting at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills.(She has since explained that after breaking her arm, she was overprescribed painkillers, which rendered her disoriented. That doctor’s medical license was subsequently revoked.)

And then she disappeared. “I definitely retreated,” Ryder explains. “I was in San Francisco. But I also wasn’t getting offers. I think it was a very mutual break.”

“It’s so interesting when you look at the early aughts,” she says. “It was a kind of cruel time. There was a lot of meanness out there.... And then I remember coming back to L.A. and—it was a rough time. And I didn’t know if that part of my life was over.”

Because of these experiences, Ryder has been mindful of how her younger costars on Stranger Things are coping with the attention the show has brought them and how they’ll adjust once it wraps. (The show will end after a fifth season, set to air in the next year or so.) “I want the kids to understand, this does not happen,” she says of being on a show so zeitgeisty that people are clamoring for your attention. “This is really unusual. And I’m always telling them, ‘The work is the reward!’ Because when I was that age, it was so hard to enjoy the fruits of my labor.”

The Duffer brothers think Ryder’s guidance has been incredibly useful to her younger costars. “She’s talked to the kids about what celebrity is like and how the press can be and the anxiety and confusion that comes along with celebrity,” says Ross Duffer. “I think she’s really helped them. I know she’s specifically helped Millie [Bobby Brown, who plays Eleven on the show] a lot to work through that. And that’s something that no one else can help with, really, because so few people have experienced it. It’s not something I understand. It’s not something that, you know, even a parent would understand.”

THE SENSITIVITY THAT MADE Ryder’s Hollywood trajectory so painful also seems to be her superpower as an actor. Harbour recalls that while they were filming a scene in season three of Stranger Things where Hopper is shooting at Soviet guards, Ryder “started talking about what these normal Russians would enjoy, saying that these people aren’t in control of their lives. And I was like, they’re just the bad guys.”

“She is just nothing but empathy,” Harbour adds. “I think her vulnerability and her big heart is really an anomaly in this business. We all as artists have a certain sensitivity. But to rise in the ranks of the film industry? She just doesn’t have any of those shells.”

“She’ll connect with anyone on set,” offers Ross Duffer. “She loves just getting to know people and talking to them. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s another actor who’s number two on the call sheet or it’s a PA who happens to be handing her water.”

Realizing that someone could pause you, could rewind you? It was so overwhelming.

The Duffers say Ryder’s input indelibly shaped the role of Joyce Byers. “We originally just thought of Joyce as this strong, devoted, worried mother,” Ross Duffer explains. “But then suddenly Winona brings an entirely new flavor to it, and we just thought about how much fun we could have with her, getting involved in the supernatural.” Ryder and the Duffers talked about their favorite childhood movies, he continues, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, “when Richard Dreyfuss’s character gets obsessed and makes a mound out of his mashed potatoes.” Soon Joyce became a multidimensional character, not just pivotal to the central plot but also helpful in drawing great performances out of the younger actors. “Winona brings it 100 percent every time,” says Matt Duffer.“I think that makes a big difference to the other actors, especially when she’s working with the kids.”

“It’s always been about the craft with Winona,” says longtime friend Keanu Reeves, who met Ryder in L.A. in the late ’80s and worked with her several times, including on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and A Scanner Darkly. Reeves was struck by Ryder’s intelligence and her sense of humor, but he says what sets her apart is that she “embodies a kind of vulnerability and a backbone at the same time. You believe her. She’s grounded. You feel the wholeness of her characters.”

In Stranger Things, Ryder adds a new layer to her usual authenticity and emotional presence: great comedic timing. “The more we’ve worked with her, we’ve discovered how funny she can be,”says Ross Duffer. “I mean, she’s really, really funny.”

It’s almost as if Gen X’s favorite gloomy teen has grown into a secure adult, finally comfortable enough in her own skin to share her wisdom and sense of humor with the world. When Ryder’s boyfriend, Hahn, shows up to drive her home, we all end up chatting amiably for almost another hour. It’s easy to imagine that he’s partly responsible for her newfound ease and confidence.