The co-star Winona Ryder spent her life waiting for: “The perfect puzzle piece”
After making her screen debut at just 14 years old in the 1986 romantic dramedy Lucas, Winona Ryder didn’t hang about when it came to establishing herself as one of the fastest-rising and brightest young stars in Hollywood.
By the time her teenage years had even drawn to a close, it was clear that she headed straight for the top after she shone in cult classic Heathers, Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, and the star-studded Mermaids. Along the way, she worked with some of the most formidable and famous names the industry had at its disposal, even if her perfect co-star hadn’t even been born yet.
When that day finally came, Ryder was a two-time Academy Award nominee and a Golden Globe winner who’d collaborated with Burton, Cher, Johnny Depp, Michael Keaton, Keanu Reeves, Anthony Hopkins, Gary Oldman, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Daniel Day-Lewis, Christian Bale, and Sigourney Weaver to name a very small few, so she knew a creative powerhouse when she saw one.
And yet, something felt incomplete until she entered the orbit of an actor who enjoyed a meteoric rise that wasn’t entirely unlike the one Ryder herself had enjoyed in the late 1980s. It sounds odd for somebody born in 1971 to say they’d spent their entire life waiting for the chance to work with a colleague who didn’t take their first breath until 2002, but that’s how she felt about Jenna Ortega.
“Jenna is absolutely one of my favourite people,” Ryder told Collider. “She is the most authentic person. We bonded. Once the conversation started, it just never stopped, and that is really true. I go to her for advice. Truly, I feel like this movie, because we talked about it for so long, had to be perfect, and I realised we’re waiting for her to be born and grow up.”
Burton’s legacy sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice arrived 36 years after the original, and if Ryder is to be believed, the reason it took so damned long is that the universe was waiting for Ortega to be born, decide she wanted to pursue acting, work closely with the director on the Netflix series Wednesday, and then be cast as the daughter of Ryder’s Lydia Deetz.
“She’s like the perfect puzzle piece to add, and she sort of completes it,” she continued. “I don’t even have enough adjectives. She’s just such an incredible person to work with and to know, and to know her is to absolutely love her.” It sounds as though Ryder views the mere existence of Ortega as a person, never mind a colleague and contemporary, as a work of cosmic fate.
Whether or not anyone chooses to agree is entirely up to them, but it must have been hard to cultivate a convincing mother/daughter relationship onscreen when Ryder makes her younger charge sound more like a soulmate than anything else.
