The night before I’m scheduled to speak with Winona Ryder in a restaurant on Central Park South, she did some arts and crafts. In red thread, she embroidered the name “Gena” over the left breast pocket of her gothic black suit with a high collar designed by Elena Dawson, who also made a jacket she wears in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”. Ryder sewed the name as a tribute to actor Gena Rowlands, who had died the previous day and who Ryder had performed alongside in Jim Jarmusch’s 1991 film “Night on Earth.” “I had to,” Ryder says, her eyes wet. She’s not sure she could make it through the day if she didn’t. She knows she’s not supposed to take up our time talking about Rowlands, but she needed to find some way to acknowledge a loss she felt deeply. Even before she worked with Rowlands, Ryder idolized the star of films like “A Woman Under the Influence” and “Opening Night.” She remembers first being introduced to Rowlands’ work when she was around 8 years old. Ryder’s mother would project John Cassavetes’ movies onto a sheet hung in a barn on the 380 acres they shared with seven other families in Northern California, surrounded by redwoods. When Ryder takes out her phone to show me a photo, I notice her home screen’s background is a collage of Rowlands.
It’s not until about 25 minutes into our interview that I actually get a chance to directly ask a question about the project that Ryder is ostensibly promoting: Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” In it, Ryder reprises her role from 1988’s “Beetlejuice” as Lydia Deetz, the sullen teen who meets a pair of ghosts in her attic and is eventually pursued by the title demon played by Michael Keaton in a now-iconic striped suit. In the long-awaited sequel, a grown-up Lydia makes a living as a TV host who talks to ghosts and is haunted by memories of Beetlejuice. She is also in a relationship with a manipulative manager (Justin Theroux) and has a glum, antisocial daughter herself (Jenna Ortega). It’s not that Ryder doesn’t want to discuss the subject at hand she’s happy to it’s just that she has so many stories that seem to burst from her, in long paragraphs filled with sentence fragments.
Sipping a chai at a steakhouse downstairs from where a row of hotel rooms have been converted into colorful versions of the new movie’s afterlife for the purposes of the junket, Ryder holds court for an audience of me. “My parents are archivists and writers and I think I inherited that archivist-slash-hoarder gene,” she says. She keeps phone numbers from the days people used to write them down. “I have Gena’s from when I did ‘Night on Earth.’ It’s really a beautiful thing to have all this stuff.” Her enormous brown eyes shining through a thick rim of eyeliner, Ryder drops names constantly, but those names are the incredibly cool kind that a cinephile craves. She discusses how she’s been texting with Jarmusch. She explains that she has two friends with whom she still exchanges handwritten letters: Keanu Reeves and Daniel Day-Lewis, her co-stars from “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and
“The Age of Innocence,” respectively. She reveals how Laura Dern, who she met during her first-ever screen test for the 1986 movie “Lucas” (which would become her film debut at the age of 14), once encouraged her to call up her crush. That guy was Elias Koteas, who turned her down. They are now pals. At 52, Ryder is in yet another transitional phase of a career that began in the 1980s when she was in high school. After decades of speculation as to whether it would ever come to pass, a “Beetlejuice” sequel has finally been made and is set for a world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Meanwhile, “Stranger Things” the Netflix series that ushered in a career revival for Ryder when it debuted in 2016 is finally wrapping up after five seasons. With its 1980s period setting, the streaming juggernaut was a fittingly retro platform for Ryder’s resurgence, but she never expected to be playing fearless Joyce Byers, the mother of a boy drawn into the Upside Down, for as long as she has, an experience extended due to pandemic delays. “I’m very much aware of what that did for me,” she says of the show.