How Winona Ryder Humbled Her Childhood Bully After Achieving Fame

Winona Ryder might be an alt-movie darling now, but the strikingly beautiful brunette was terribly bullied in school. In Nigel Gooddall's biography, Ryder describes being attacked in seventh grade by her peers at Kenilworth Junior High in Petaluma, California. "I was wearing an old Salvation Army shop boy's suit," the actress explained (via People), and the other students hurled homophobic slurs at her. "They slammed my head into a locker. I fell to the ground and they started to kick the s*** out of me. I had to have stitches." To add insult to injury, Ryder's attackers weren't disciplined. Instead, the young actress was kicked out of the school.

Though she had won audience hearts in Tim Burton's "Beetlejuice," Ryder's starring role just made high school harder for her. "I remember thinking, 'Ooh, Beetlejuice is like the number-one movie. This is going to make things great at school,'" Ryder told Marie Claire UK. "But it made things worse. They called me a witch."

Still, Goodall's biography reports that Ryder got to call out her bullies years later, after becoming a 90s it girl. "I went to a coffee shop and I ran into one of the girls who'd kicked me, and she said, 'Winona, Winona, can I have your autograph?'" Ryder explained. "And I said, 'Do you remember me? Remember in seventh grade you beat up that kid?' And she said, 'Kind of.' And I said, 'That was me. Go f*** yourself.'" 

After starring in a string of cult favorite films — from the critically acclaimed "Girl, Interrupted" to indie darling "Reality Bites" — Winona Ryder earned a reputation as the go-to leading woman for dark, quirky films. Then, she largely disappeared from the public eye for several years following a shoplifting conviction in 2001. "It allowed me time that I really needed," Ryder explained in an interview with Porter Magazine (via The Independent). "A lot of people had the perception that I just disappeared in the 2000s. And I did, but only from that world ... I was transformed into doing stuff I really wanted to do — it was a great awakening. It just wasn't in the public eye."

Beginning in 2016, she experienced a career transformation driven in part by her role as Joyce Byers in the Netflix 80s nostalgia show "Stranger Things." Ryder's presence has imbued the show with an 80s realism — and she's kept the "Stranger Things" creators accurate in smaller ways, too. Co-star and friend, David Harbour told Harper's Bazaar that she has a sharp memory: "She'd tell them, 'This song actually came out in '85, and you have it in '83 ... She knew all of these minute, tiny details they didn't even know, and they had to change things in the script based on that ... It's just kind of epic how wild her mind is and how it goes to all these different corners."