The Winona Ryder performance inspired by John Lennon’s assassination: “Sick devastation”
It’s tough to remember the last time a show had the kind of buzz that Stranger Things currently enjoys as the fifth season prepares to land on Netflix, and pretty much anyone with eyes and a telly gets ready to travel back to the Upside Down for the last time. Winona Ryder has been there right from the start, and she was one of the very best things about that fantastic opening season.
The creepy throwback show brought her to the attention of a completely new generation, many of whom may well have never heard of her before or been aware that she was a massive name in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, movies like Heathers, Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands making her the kind of actor you’d seen on bedroom wall posters all over the world.
She also quite impressively managed to survive a fairly disastrous showing (but no worse than Keanu Reeves) in Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992 to claim two Oscar-nominated roles in consecutive years, albeit for period dramas, which are awful and always have been and are only liked by divorcees in their 50s. By the mid-1990s, she was a genuine A-lister, and Reality Bites with Ethan Hawke was a zeitgeist-capturing high point for her in 1994.
But a few years earlier, before she’d even hit her twenties, she was cast in Mermaids alongside Cher and Bob Hoskins, a film set in 1960s small-town America about a wayward teenager struggling to deal with her mother’s constant relocating after every failed relationship. It was a coming-of-age role for Ryder, who is affected by hearing about the assassination of JFK during the film. She picked up a Golden Globe nomination for her performance.
JFK was shot some 26 years before Mermaids was shot, meaning Ryder didn’t have real-life memories to call upon, so instead she looked back at a similarly shocking celebrity murder. She said at the time: “The only thing that I had to draw on, if I drew on anything, would be the assassination of John Lennon. He’s the only person that was assassinated that I was devastated by. I remember the feeling… I felt that same kind of sick devastation.”
There are certainly many parallels between the world-shaking shootings of JFK and Lennon, who was killed outside his home in the Dakota building in New York in 1980. Both were truly iconic figures who held the hopes of millions and wanted to change the establishment, gaining them plenty of enemies along the way.
Mermaids was a moderate hit on release and certainly helped Ryder on her way to global fame in the ’90s. At the start of the next decade, however, she found herself embroiled in a shoplifting scandal and disappeared from public view for a considerable amount of time, only coming back to movies for a small role in Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly in 2006.
She took another reduced part in the Star Trek reboot in 2009 and then a supporting role in Darren Aronofsky’s big hit Black Swan the following year, but it was without doubt Stranger Things that relaunched her career to a spectacular degree as she gained both Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for her performance as Joyce Byers in the sci-fi horror phenomenon.
