Winona Ryder Says She Lost Film Role Over ‘Heathers’: “They Thought It Was Making Fun of Teen Suicide”
Throughout her long acting career, Winona Ryder has played a number of memorable roles, but it was the 1989 dark comedy Heathers that led to her losing a job.
The Oscar-nominated actress, who became popular with a younger generation through her role in Netflix’s Stranger Things, says in a new Elle UK cover story that she was told that her early-career role in Heathers, alongside Shannen Doherty and Christian Slater, would mark the end of her career.
“I was told I was never gonna work again if I did Heathers,” she says.
And while she went on to book multiple well-known movies and TV shows, Ryder admits that after Heathers, “I did lose a job.”
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Ryder says she had landed a role in The Freshman, the 1990 movie with Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick, but after the filmmakers saw Heathers, she says, “they revoked the offer.”
“They thought it was making fun of teen suicide,” she recalls of their reaction to Heathers. “They were deeply offended and, yeah, they revoked the offer.”
Though she was disappointed to lose the Freshman role, Ryder remains proud of Heathers.
“I had to stand my ground. I wasn’t gonna apologize,” she says, adding, “I never turn off Heathers if it’s on. I know it basically by heart.”
In the film, directed by Michael Lehmann and written by Daniel Waters, Ryder’s Veronica is part of her high school’s titular clique of mean girls but gets involved with rebellious new student J.D. (Slater), who starts killing his classmates and staging their deaths as suicides as part of a quest for revenge.
Lehmann previously defended the film against claims it was mocking teenage suicide in a 2016 interview with The Denver Post.
“The more horrifying or disturbing human behavior is, the more opportunity there is to mine it for certain types of comedy,” he said. “You click it a few notches in one direction or another to make it absurd, and it allows to you to understand human behavior better, because people do horrible things with the best intentions.”
He added, “When it came out a lot of people were very upset and there was a big politically correct backlash saying, ‘How dare you make fun of teenage suicide!’ But Columbine hadn’t happened yet. And anyway, we weren’t making fun of teenage suicide, we were making a comedy about the way teenagers are perceived by adults and how they behave to each other.”
Ryder previously told Harper’s Bazaar that her agent “literally got down on her knees” to beg her not to star in Heathers.
Ryder recalled, “She’s like, ‘Please, you’re gonna destroy any chance of a career.’ I think I made the right call.”
