He Did Not Like Me

Winona Ryder said in a new interview with Esquire magazine that she felt blacklisted by Miramax in “the late 1990s and early 2000s” due to “various reasons,” one of which was a meeting with the company’s co-founder Harvey Weinstein that allegedly angered him. Weinstein ran Miramax until 2005. He is currently in prison for sexual assault.

“The one time I was supposed to have a meeting with [Harvey Weinstein], 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 said. “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.”

Ryder had already worked on a Miramax movie at that point in her career, 1993’s “The House of the Spirits,” and remembered Weinstein pounding on her trailer door during production. He was allegedly adamant about her starring in a film adaptation of the stage play “Little Voice.”

“And I was like, ‘Oh my God, I just saw that in London,’” Ryder said. “I was like, ‘You have to cast that girl [from the play], Jane Horrocks. She’s fucking amazing.’ And he got very weird and he left.”

“He did not like me,” Ryder added.

While Ryder did not experience any sexual misconduct at the hands of Weinstein, she did battle sexual harassment as an actor during her twenties and thirties, saying she “had a couple of difficult experiences with a couple of people who were just blatantly sexually harassing me.”

“It wasn’t an assault. But it was incredibly inappropriate,” Ryder said. “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 said that she told her “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” co-star Jenna Ortega about some of these experiences: “And as I was saying it, I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, that’s really fucked up.’”

“If someone was being inappropriate or drunkenly hitting on me it was like, ‘Ha ha!’” she remembered. “You kind of do that. ‘Ha ha!’ Inappropriate? I dealt with that. But touching me? It felt very invasive.”

Head over to Esquire’s website to read Ryder’s cover story in its entirety.