Winona Ryder’s favourite Winona Ryder movie: “I’ve probably seen it 50 times”
Winona Ryder isn’t scared to watch her own movies back, which is something that not every actor can say.
Personally, if I were an actor, it’d take a lot of convincing to get me to watch one of my own movies. There’s surely something so vulnerable about watching yourself embody someone else on screen – you become hyper-critical of every move. But to be an actor means having a lot more self-confidence than I do, so you can hardly hold me as a benchmark.
Ryder, on the other hand, has made a career of playing interesting characters, and clearly, she’s proud of the work she has done over the years. In fact, there’s one movie of hers that she is always down to watch, considering herself a huge fan of it.
It wasn’t long before Ryder, who had made her acting debut just a few years earlier in the movie Lucas, secured the role of Veronica Sawyer in Heathers. It would be her first leading role, but certainly not her last. With her performance as the teenager who decides to break free from her clique, where she is the only one not called Heather, Ryder boldly stepped into the spotlight and showed a natural propensity for characters that weren’t necessarily good or bad. She could evidently do ambiguous parts incredibly well, which takes real skill.
Whenever she gets the chance, Ryder will sit down and watch Heathers, and not because she gets a vain kick out of watching her early career-defining performance. Rather, the actor simply thinks it’s a great film – and she wouldn’t be wrong. When I first saw Heathers as a teenager, I was obsessed with the salacious catchphrases (“Fuck me gently with a chainsaw,” one of the Heathers says), but revisiting it a few years later, I was unsure whether it would hold up now that I was no longer revelling in a world of adolescent angst.
Yet, sure enough, it does hold up incredibly well, with its razor-sharp satire of hierarchy and high-school popularity colliding with the perfect mixture of humour and darkness. Ryder’s portrayal of Veronica is an ideal balance of cunning and innocence – we seem to side with her even when she starts to get caught up in the murderous plans that her new boyfriend, JD, decides to execute.
Directed by Michael Lehmann, Heathers was a bold high-school movie that stood apart from titles like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Pretty In Pink, which emerged a few years earlier. “I looove this movie—to the point where I talk about it like I’m not even in it,” Ryder once told Entertainment Weekly. “If it’s on TV, I watch it. I’ve probably seen it 50 times. Like, I can do it by heart.”
Heathers has endured as a cult classic for years, despite the fact it actually lost several million at the box office. It’s hard to imagine what coming-of-age cinema would look like without the influence of the darkly satirical film – perhaps we’d still be in the dated dark ages of John Hughes’ cinematic world. You can see the influence of Heathers on movies like Mean Girls, for example, which shared the same bitter bite that allowed it to stand out as a high-school movie with a certain edge.
It’s no wonder Ryder thinks so highly of Heathers. Not only is it unequivocally great, but it truly launched her career, and from there, she has become one of the most well-known stars of her generation.
