Winona Ryder Threatened By Director After Reporting Him
While Winona had already been acting for a few years by this point, it was this performance that really put her name on the map, and before long, she was one of the biggest names in Hollywood. And, as you might expect, being a young woman in the acting world during this era wasn't exactly a walk in the park.
Speaking to Esquire just last year, Winona revealed that she was sexually harassed throughout her career, and even suggested that it was no coincidence that her decline in the late '90s coincided with the rise of disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein, who is currently serving time in prison for various sexual abuse charges.
In fact, Winona claimed that she was 'blacklisted' by Miramax, the company Harvey ran until 2005, for 'various reasons.' Appearing to refer to the fact she'd already been in the industry for several years before Harvey gained prominence, Winona said: 'I think I knew a little bit too much. He did not like me.'And while being shunned by him may have meant that Winona thankfully escaped falling victim to Harvey in other ways, she said that she still endured relentless sexual harassment from other men in the industry.'I had a couple of difficult experiences with a couple of people who were just blatantly sexually harassing me,' she recalled. 'And then it happened again in my thirties. It wasn't an assault. But it was incredibly inappropriate. It was wild.'
'I was lucky because I was known, so it didn't happen as much as maybe it would if I had been a struggling actor,' Winona then acknowledged. 'But I remember this feeling in your mind: you're negotiating, you're thinking about what's going to happen if you say something. You're working it out while this person is being extremely creepy.'
Winona also said that she became accustomed to jovially brushing off unwanted advances from men, saying: 'If someone was being inappropriate or drunkenly hitting on me it was like, 'Ha ha!' You kind of do that. 'Ha ha!' Inappropriate? I dealt with that. But touching me? It felt very invasive.'And while Winona doesn't intend on naming any of the men involved, she did open up some more about her troubling on-set experiences in a new interview with Elle.
Speaking to the publication, the actor, now 53, revealed that when she was younger, a director threatened her during filming after she reported his problematic behavior toward her to the movie's producers. Winona said that she told the producers the director was being inappropriate, and asked if they could talk to him about it.
'The next day I had a big scene,' she shared, detailing how the director approached her on set to discuss the scene before changing his tone to a whisper. 'He came up to me, and he was like: 'OK, so, um, if we just try it like — you fucking cunt, I'm gonna destroy your fucking life. OK? So let's just do it like that?''
'And I had to fucking act,' Winona went on. '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.'
Even more shockingly, Winona said that she didn't even realize just how messed up this moment was until she was telling her Beetlejuice Beetlejuice co-stars Jenna Ortega, Michael Keaton, and Catherine O'Hara about it two years ago.
'I was almost telling it like it was this funny story,' she confessed. '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.''
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