“I was just an actor for hire”: the troubled movie that Winona Ryder disowned
Outside of a very select group who dictate their own direction, there aren’t many actors who treat every project as a passion project. Winona Ryder may have been one of the brightest young stars in Hollywood by the turn of the millennium, but she was still working as a hired gun on occasion.
After first breaking out in Beetlejuice and Heathers in the late 1980s, Ryder spent the next decade reaffirming her credentials by lending her talents to Edward Scissorhands, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, Little Women, The Crucible, and Alien Resurrection.
By the time Autumn in New York was released in August 2000, Ryder was already a two-time Academy Award-nominated performer who’d lent her talents to modern classics, cult favourites, box office smash hits, and awards season favourites, and she was still only 28 years old.
Her previous feature was Girl, Interrupted, a film she held closer to her heart than any other. Not only did she play the lead role, but she’d partnered with producer Douglas Wick to buy the rights to Susanna Kaysen’s memoir as a starring role for herself, receiving the first behind-the-camera credit of her career as an executive producer.
Autumn in New York was almost the exact opposite, with Ryder the last name to join the ensemble as a character that had been developed with somebody else in mind. There were no notable issues during shooting, but the grubby fingerprints of studio interference ended up making a significant mark.
Backers MGM effectively removed the romantic drama from director Joan Chen during post-production and re-edited it to their own satisfaction. At the same time, the decision not to hold any advance screenings for critics is typically interpreted as a sign of an inevitably poor reception. Sure enough, Autumn in New York was resoundingly panned, but it did at least manage to turn a tidy profit.
For their performances as a playboy restaurateur struggling with a midlife crisis and the free-spirited woman half his age who succumbs to a terminal illness after a brief romance, Richard Gere and Ryder were nominated for ‘Worst Screen Couple’ at the Golden Raspberry Awards. Quick to deflect the blame, the latter essentially washed her hands of Autumn in New York, even when she was being tasked to promote it.
“I was just an actor for hire on Autumn in New York,” she clarified in an interview with Cinema. “I wasn’t part of the artistic collaboration because I was hired last. The role had been tailored with someone else in mind. I’d just come off Girl, Interrupted, which was a labour of love for me, so it was a difficult adjustment.”
Clearly, it’s not a film Ryder is going to look back on fondly as a career highlight, not that she’d be the first actor to distance themselves from a troubled project by confessing they were there solely for the job they were getting paid to do; no more, and no less.
