Winona Ryder Says She Was ‘Screamed at’ After Her 'Weird' First Meeting With Harvey Weinstein

Actress Winona Ryder has achieved great success playing savvy roles like the wisecracking Joyce Byers in Stranger Things and the sophisticated Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice. The twice-nominated Oscar winner first gained recognition for her quirky roles in the 1980s and 1990s. However, behind the scenes, things weren't peachy. Ryder admitted that she was placed on Miramax's 'blacklist' in the late '90s and early 2000s for "various reasons," one of which she claimed was an unpleasant meeting with Harvey Weinstein, the co-founder of the firm. 

“The one time I was supposed to have a meeting with [Harvey Weinstein], I went to the Miramax office. I extended my hand and he shook my hand and I sat on the couch and we had a conversation and I left,” Ryder recalled in a recent interview with Esquire Magazine. “And [afterwards] I got like screamed at [by an agent]. ‘What the fuck did you do?’ I was like, ‘What?’ Apparently, I offended him because I extended my hand?…I guess.” She also narrated another incident where Weinstein banged on her trailer door while she was working on a Miramax project, The House of the Spirits. He was reportedly determined that she play the lead role in a movie version of the stage production of Little Voice.

“And I was like, ‘Oh my God, I just saw that in London,’” Ryder recounted. “I was like, ‘You have to cast that girl [from the play], Jane Horrocks. She’s f*cking amazing.’ And he got very weird and he left.” In her opinion, he did not hire her and stopped others from doing so for reasons other than those encounters. “I think I knew a little bit too much,” she opined. “He did not like me,” Ryder added, as reported by HuffPost.

“I had a couple of difficult experiences with a couple of people who were just blatantly sexually harassing me,” she shared. “And then it happened again in my thirties. It wasn’t an assault. But it was incredibly inappropriate. It was wild. I really understand [what the victims of Weinstein and others went through]. I was lucky because I was known, so it didn’t happen as much as maybe it would [have] if I had been a struggling actor. But I remember this feeling in your mind— you’re negotiating, you’re thinking about what’s going to happen if you say something. You’re working it out while this person is being extremely creepy.” 

“If someone was being inappropriate or drunkenly hitting on me it was like, ‘Ha ha!’. You kind of do that. ‘Ha ha!’ Inappropriate? I dealt with that. But touching me? It felt very invasive.” She concluded, “I think in retrospect, it really soured [her on making movies]. All the great actors always told me that when it stops being amazing, you gotta get out. I really took that to heart.”