The co-star Winona Ryder wants to work with forever: “I’m totally serious”
In her career, Winona Ryder has worked with many of the great actors of several different eras of filmmaking. As a young star breaking out in the late 1980s/early 1990s, she shared the screen with Michael Keaton, Geena Davis, Johnny Depp, Dianne Wiest, Christian Slater, Cher, and Anthony Hopkins. As she became an established A-lister, she worked with Daniel Day-Lewis, Sigourney Weaver, Angelina Jolie, Natalie Portman, and Adam Sandler. However, there is only one star she insists she would work with on every one of her films – although their three collaborations have had to suffice.
Ryder first appeared opposite this star in 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s gothic horror opus that was beloved and critically acclaimed, despite both Ryder and this star coming in for some scathing criticism for their parts in it. The young stars were attacked for their attempts at Victorian London accents, with Ryder’s good-natured co-star being particularly thrown under the bus. In fact, his accent in Dracula is widely cited as the worst accent ever put to film, and it’s hard to argue with that statement when you watch the movie.
Despite this criticism, the two young stars formed a bond on that movie that lasted for the next three decades. They finally managed to work together again in 2006’s rotoscope animated sci-fi mystery A Scanner Darkly, and then re-teamed for a third time in the 2018 rom-com Destination Wedding. In case it isn’t obvious by now, the object of Ryder’s affection is none other than Keanu Reeves, a man she has unashamedly claimed to love for the last 30+ years.
“I wish I could do every movie with him,” Ryder told Entertainment Weekly in 2018. “I’m totally serious, and I really mean that. We love each other.”
Ryder revealed that she and Reeves came up in Hollywood around the same time, and even though he is seven years older, they’ve always felt like kindred spirits. “For me, he’s one of my favourite people to be around and to work with,” she gushed. “There’s a real trust, and he’s constantly surprising me, and I also just feel completely protected. It’s the feeling of someone’s really got your back, and you can try anything. There’s not a lot of people that have that sort of quality.”
Despite playing love interests in two of their three cinematic collaborations, Ryder and Reeves never dated in real life. However, their friendship bond is incredibly strong, perhaps because they went through the crucible of Dracula together. Indeed, Ryder once told Vanity Fair that Reeves was instrumental in helping her get through the “trauma” she experienced while making that movie. It’s never been confirmed what exactly that trauma was, but it was always rumoured that she and co-star Gary Oldman, who played the titular Count, didn’t get along.
“I was always just so happy when you were around because there was so much, sort of, trauma,” Ryder told Reeves. “I have these journals, and I just pulled one out recently, and it was from around the time of Dracula. The text: ‘Angst, angst, angst, angst. Thank God for Keanu. Thank God I’m going to see Keanu.”
Amusingly, the two stars still refer to each other as “husband” and “wife” in text messages, because Ryder claims they were legally married during an important Dracula scene. “No, I swear to god, I think we’re married in real life,” Ryder chuckled to EW. “In that scene, Francis used a real Romanian priest. We shot the master, and he did the whole thing. So I think we’re married.”
When a confused Reeves replied, “We said yes?” Ryder insisted, “Don’t you remember that? It was on Valentine’s Day!” To this, the befuddled John Wick star could only smile, “Oh my gosh, we’re married.”
