How did Winona Ryder fight for her role in ‘Heathers’?
Winona Ryder made her on-screen debut in the 1984 film Lucas which was seen by Tim Burton, who subsequently cast her in Beetlejuice. With only a few credits to her name, Ryder was also selected to star in 1988’s Heathers, the iconic independent anti-teen movie about a high-school couple who begin murdering the popular kids.
Daniel Waters wrote the film with the aim of contrasting the typical John Hughes teen flicks of the era with something much darker and satirical. The writer penned the project whilst working at a video store, hoping Stanley Kubrick would direct it. Discussing the work, he once said: “I was inundated with so many kinds of teen films that I said, ‘Well, basically, as a viewer, what’s missing from the equation?’ Stanley Kubrick did a war film; he did a science fiction film and he did a horror film. What would his teen film be like?”
Of course, Kubrick did not direct the film – Michael Lehmann did. The director brought Waters’ quotable movie to life, complete with the help of producer Denise Di Novi. She explained that “the dialogue was not really how people spoke, but how you wish people spoke. It was a way of kind of showing in this hyper-real way how rough it was to be a teenager.”
Ryder performs excellently in her role as Veronica, the popular girl who has become disillusioned by her clique’s behaviour and longs for her old, kinder friends. It is hard to imagine anyone else playing steely-eyed Veronica, yet Ryder almost missed out on playing the part. Waters revealed that he initially thought Ryder was not attractive enough to play the once-popular character.
He explained: “Winona likes to tease me that I wanted Jennifer Connelly instead of her and I didn’t think Winona was pretty enough. Because she was — at that time, she had only done Lucas and Square Dance, not even Beetlejuice, so I thought she was this scrawny little unattractive girl. So I said, ‘It can’t be!’ But of course now everyone makes fun of me, so.”
However, he changed his mind once meeting the teenage actor: “Well, the writer of Beetlejuice and a lot of people knew Winona, and then when I met Winona, I was like, ‘Oh my god. She’s great. She’s perfect.'” It turned out that Ryder was a massive fan of the script. “No one has ever liked a piece of writing more than Winona Ryder liked the script of Heathers and she was so eloquent about her love for it that how could it be anyone else?” Ryder even said, “It was the greatest piece of literature since Catcher in the Rye.”
Ryder’s agent was also unsure about her starring in Heathers, suggesting that it could ruin her reputation, going as far as to get down on her knees and beg the young actor not to accept the role. Yet Ryder insisted after becoming “obsessed” with the script.
Di Novi recalled: “Winona was so smart. She was fifteen, she turned sixteen on the movie. She was a prodigy. From a very young age, she was an old soul. She really got the words and the imagery. She had watched tons of old movies. She was really sophisticated intellectually. She had the beauty of Veronica. She had the intelligence. She was just the perfect anti-Heather.”
Ryder’s persistence paid off, and critics highly praised her performance. Although Heathers wasn’t a box office hit, it has since gained a cult following and helped to catapult Ryder to greater heights. During the next decade, Ryder’s star status only increased as she starred in hits such as Edward Scissorhands, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and The Age of Innocence.