Winona Ryder Recalls Meeting Harvey Weinstein for the First Time: ‘He Didn’t Like Me’

August 29, 2024 @ 7:12 PM

Winona Ryder was blacklisted by now imprisoned movie mogul Harvey Weinstein in the ’90s because, she thinks, she offended him by trying to shake hands the first time they met.

“He did not like me,” she recalled in an interview with Esquire, published Thursday.

“The one time I was supposed to have a meeting with [Harvey], I went to the Miramax office and 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.

She said that an agent “screamed at” her afterward: “What the f–k did you do?”

“Apparently, I offended him because I extended my hand?,” the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” and “Stranger Things” actress explained.

But that wasn’t her last run-in with him. When she was filming the 1993 Miramax movie “The House of the Spirits,” he banged on the door of her trailer and told her he wanted her to star in his screen adaptation of the play “Little Voice.”

“And I was like, ‘Oh my God, I just saw that in London.’ I was like, ‘You have to cast that girl [from the play], Jane Horrocks. She’s f–king amazing.’ And he got very weird and he left.” (As Ryder suggested, Horrocks was cast in the film, which came out in 1998.)

Ryder also said cryptically that the reason he wouldn’t hire her and told other producers not to cast her was because “I think I knew a little bit too much.”

Although Ryder clarified she was never sexually harassed or assaulted by Weinstein, she said that when she was in her late 20s, “I had a couple of difficult experiences with a couple of people who were just blatantly sexually harassing me.”

She recalled another incident that happened in her 30s. “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 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.”

Ryder told her “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” costar Jenna Ortega about what she experienced when she was her age when it hit her. “As I was saying it, I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, that’s really f–ked up.’”

The actress, who reprises her role of Lydia Deetz in the Tim Burton sequel out Sept. 6, said, “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.”