Hollywood star Winona Ryder has opened up about the time a director threatened to ‘destroy her life’ after she reported him for harassment to producers.
This isn’t the first troubling on-set experience Ryder shares, with her sharing several other unsettling stories about her time in the industry.
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Ryder has been known in Hollywood since she was a teen
Ryder, 53, has been in the acting scene since she was a teenager, with her only having been 15 years old when she starred in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice in 1988, which shot her to global stardom at a young age.
It wasn’t an easy career
It’s obvious that carrying yourself in Hollywood at such a young age for a woman was a difficult task, and Ryder has indeed opened up about the issues she faced.
In one Esquire interview last year, Ryder said she was sexually harassed throughout her career.
She suggested it got her blacklisted
The actor suggested that her decline in the late ‘90s coinciding with the rise of disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein was no coincidence.
Ryder even claimed she was “blacklisted” by Miramax, the company Weinstein ran until 2005, for “various reasons.”
“I think I knew a little bit too much. He did not like me,” Ryder said on Weinstein, who is currently serving time in prison for several sexual abuse charges.
One director threatened to destroy her life
Now, speaking to Elle in an interview published July 24, Ryder revealed that when she was younger, a director threatened her during filming.
It was after she reported his inappropriate behavior to the producers on set, whom she asked if they could talk to him about it.
He came up to her while filming
“The next day I had a big scene,” Ryder said. She detailed how he approached her on set to discuss the scene, but changed his tone to a whisper.
Ryder recalled, “He came up to me, and he was like: ‘OK, so, um, if we just try it like — you f***ing c***, I’m gonna destroy your f***ing life. OK? So let’s just do it like that?’”
Her brother was on set but she didn’t tell him
“And I had to fucking act,” Winona continued, adding, “And what’s so crazy is my brother was working as a PA on the movie, and I didn’t even tell him, and I didn’t complain.”
She only recently realized it wasn’t OK
Ryder added that, shockingly, she only fully realized how messed up that interaction was when she recalled it to her Beetlejuice Beetlejuice co-stars Jenna Ortega, Michael Keaton, and Catherine O’Hara two years ago.
Ryder had to see other people’s reactions
“I was almost telling it like it was this funny story,” the 53-year-old star recalled.
“Then I’m looking at Jenna’s face and imagining it happening to her. It wasn’t until that moment that I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is bad.’”
