Winona Ryder opens up about harassment in Hollywood and her history with Harvey Weinstein
What was acceptable in Hollywood before and after the #MeToo movement is very different, and someone who has been there through it all, Winona Ryder, is sounding off.
To Esquire, the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice star opened up about the old days of Hollywood in the ’80s and ’90s — and yes, some of her stories include disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Ryder didn’t provide the names of “a couple of people” in Hollywood “who were just blatantly sexually harassing me” when she was in her late 20s.
“It wasn’t an assault. But it was incredibly inappropriate. It was wild,” she said.
“I was lucky because I was known, so it didn’t happen as much as maybe it would if I had been a struggling actor. But I remember this feeling in your mind: You’re negotiating … You’re working it out while this person is being extremely creepy.”
It “soured” her on Hollywood, she said.
Regarding Weinstein, she believes a couple of awkward meetings with him got her blacklisted from potential projects.
“The one time I was supposed to have a meeting with [him], I went to the Miramax office and I extended my hand and he shook my hand and … we had a conversation and I left,” she recalls.
“And [afterward] I got like screamed at [by an agent]. ‘What the f*** did you do?’ Apparently, I offended him because I extended my hand?”
On another occasion, she says she unintentionally rebuffed his offer to star in an adaptation of the play Little Voice by recommending instead the “amazing” actress who had played the role onstage, Jane Horrocks. “And he got very weird and he left.”
For the record, the former producer, currently in jail on sex charges, denied the exchanges to Entertainment Weekly through his attorney, offering “only good thoughts and kind wishes for happiness and success for her.”
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