Winona Ryder reminisces about the 2000s, says the era was a ‘cruel time’

Winona Ryder is one of the most emblematic actresses in the world. She rose to prominence in the ‘80s and ‘90s, embodying a generation of people with her wide assortment of moody teen and young adult roles. Then, in the 2000s, her career plummeted. She discussed it all in a new interview.

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Harper’s Bazaar published a profile on Ryder, discussing her work and her personality with some of her coworkers. The article discusses her work, her relationship with her boyfriend Scott Mackinlay Hahn, and the negative experiences she’s had in Hollywood. “This business is brutal,” Ryder said. “You’re working constantly, but if you want to take a break, they tell you, ‘If you slow down, it’s going to stop.’”

Ryder’s prevalance in media was thorough, from starring in iconic films to being a part of one of the most romanticized relationships of all time, with Johnny Depp. Ryder credits a union of several things for her emotional decline in the ‘90s, among them, her breakup with Depp. “That was my Girl, Interrupted real life,” she said, referencing the film where she plays a young woman with bipolar disorder, who is trapped in a psychiatric hospital. “I’ve never talked about it,” she said. “There’s this part of me that’s very private. I have such, like, a place in my heart for those days. But for someone younger who grew up with social media, it’s hard to describe.”

Then came the 2000s, an era that Ryder calls particularly cruel. She was caught shoplifting in Saks Fifth Avenue and became the subject of the tabloids, much like other prominent women of the time. Hollywood ostracized her. Ryder has explained what happened during that episode, sharing that she’d broken her arm and was overprescribed pain killers, leaving her disoriented. “It’s so interesting when you look at the early aughts,” she says. “It was a kind of cruel time. There was a lot of meanness out there.... And then I remember coming back to L.A. and—it was a rough time. And I didn’t know if that part of my life was over.”

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Ryder’s coworkers share that she has a unique perspective that she brings and shares with the cast of kids. “This is really unusual,” says Ryder when speaking to the kids. “And I’m always telling them, ‘The work is the reward!’ Because when I was that age, it was so hard to enjoy the fruits of my labor.”

“I think she’s really helped them. I know she’s specifically helped Millie [Bobby Brown, who plays Eleven on the show] a lot to work through that. And that’s something that no one else can help with, really, because so few people have experienced it,” said the Duffer Brothers, showrunners and creators of “Stranger Things.”

Currently, Ryder is steadily on our screens. We’ll see her again this weekend on “Stranger Things” and has starred in a variety of interesting projects, including the HBO series “The Plot Against America,” and the independent film “Gone in the Night.”