“They threw cafeteria food at me”: Winona Ryder’s early struggles being cast as the “ugly girl”
By the age of 24, Winona Ryder was already a two-time Academy Award nominee and an established star in Hollywood, and certainly not a performer anybody in their right mind would consider calling ugly.
Unfortunately, Hollywood can be an unforgiving place at the best of times, and Ryder struggled under that spotlight after first breaking through as a teenager. While attitudes have mercifully changed with the passage of time, a young woman taking her first steps in cinema was inevitably placed under a harsher spotlight than most when she made her initial waves in the late 1980s.
Ryder made her screen debut in the romantic dramedy Lucas, which hit cinemas when she was just 14. Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, cult classic Heathers, and hit comedy Mermaids were all released before she’d even turned 20, and becoming so well-known at such an early age was something she found difficult to deal with.
“If I showed you scripts from my first few movies, the descriptions of the characters all said ‘the ugly girl,'” she told W. “Starting with the character I played in Lucas, she was described as homely, unattractive. Beetlejuice was like, ‘Enter Lydia, a freak who looks like an Edward Gorey character.”
Despite Beetlejuice debuting at the top of the box office, Ryder’s schoolmates were less than impressed with her extracurricular success, with the star admitting “they threw Cheetos and cafeteria food at me” and called her names, even though she was playing a major role in the number one movie in the country at the time.
Reading characters described on the page as unattractive and then facing a barrage of abuse from peers can’t have been an easy thing to stomach, and many talents have succumbed to the very insecurities Ryder was trying to keep at arm’s length. Proving the doubters wrong is a lot easier said than done, though, but it wasn’t long before the perception began to shift.
The actor “always sort of assumed that it wasn’t until Mermaids or Dracula that people thought I was pretty,” which should never be the thought lurking at the forefront of any actor’s mind. Beyond erasing those doubts from her own psyche, Ryder set about proving her worth as a dramatic performer, too, with Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and literary adaptation Little Women earning her consecutive Oscar nominations for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ and ‘Best Actress’, respectively.
She was an established star, a hot commodity, and the recipient of recognition from the most prestigious ceremony in the business in her mid-20s, but it was only in the period immediately beforehand that Ryder finally overcame the image issues that had been foisted upon her by screenplays and schoolmates, which may well have been the impetus behind her ascension.
