So happy to start the day with two of my favourites. First Carey Mulligan, now one of my all-timers, Winona Ryder who was at the premiere of Experimenter in New York last night. It was hard to find shots of her without those shock eyes. She seems to be opening them up extra wide in most of these pictures, and they’re already large and arresting to begin with. Always so uncomfortable in these situations, even though she’s been famous for so long. But because she’s been famous for so long, you forget that fame caught her and kept her young. And when she was young, she wasn’t Johnny Depp’s girlfriend, at one time the most famous young actress in the world, the Jennifer Lawrence/Emma Stone/Kristen Stewart of her generation.
The Daily Beast interviewed Winona for Experimenter and talked to her about her childhood, how she was bullied, how being bullied got her into acting. And how at the beginning, she was the weird one. You remember her in Lucas? This is probably how she still sees herself:
Or like this:
And the way we see her?
More like this, right?
Or this:
She’s asked about that in the interview, about being publicly captured by nostalgia. You see it on Instagram and Twitter once a week. Throwback Thursdays, always from the 90s. I’m doing it right now. I’ve been holding her through the entire history of this blog. What’s that like for her?
“I want to be allowed to get older, but people are very attached to me at this certain time. So with Experimenter and Show Me a Hero, I’ve started to feel more liberated to play my own age—which was tough for me for a while because I sort of look too young, and I’m sure there were other factors involved, but your thirties are tough when you’ve had so much success in your teens and twenties, and people have this idea of you as the girl from Reality Bites, you know? So then people are like, ‘What? She’s a lawyer?!’ Even though I clearly could’ve gone to law school or something like that.”
And of course there are the memories of her and Johnny Depp, probably a thousand Tumblr accounts dedicated to that romance. The Daily Beast asked her about that too:
“It’s gotta just be the nostalgia, I guess. Honestly, I think there were six pictures of us taken and they probably just do the filter thing. I’ve heard that but I can only guess that it’s nostalgia. We were both very young and pretty open about our feelings. We hadn’t learned yet to not share everything with everyone. But now, it’s as if it happened yesterday. I don’t know. With all the social media, it’s a totally different world now.”
It really is. In the new world, Johnny Depp is constantly embarrassing himself. Winona though, I don’t think I could ever not love her. I don’t think she would ever turn into what he turned into. Because I don’t think she’s ever pretended.
Click here to read her interview with the Daily Beast.
