Winona Ryder Once Shared She Had a Rough Time in Her 30s Because of Her Success in Her 20s

Actor Winona Ryder achieved Hollywood success at a very young age. But as she grew a little older, she began to experience all the difficulties she thought she would’ve had while in her 20s.

Winona Ryder felt it was a fluke that she got into acting at a young age

There are some celebrities who aspire to get into Hollywood when they’re just children. But Ryder became an actor through a combination of luck and talent. When she was a child, the Beetlejuice star had her sights set far away from the film industry. As far as she could recall, Ryder figured she’d end up telling stories a different way.

“Well, the fact that I got into this at all was kind of fluke-ish. I loved movies, but I can’t remember ever really wanting to be an actress, and I certainly didn’t imagine ever being in a movie. I think I wanted to be a writer,” she once said on Interview.

When she was 12, she and her parents moved to town in California, where she didn’t have a particularly nice time at school and was bullied. Eventually, her parents enrolled her into a theater program because of the circumstances.

“We had just moved to this town, so I didn’t have any friends, and my parents, god bless them, scrimped and saved to send me to ACT [American Conservatory Theater in San -Francisco] three times a week as a kind of outlet. So I was like taking these acting classes, but I was so young that it wasn’t really in my sights to have a career,” she said.

Ryder received her first movie role thanks to being enrolled in ACT. This would unknowingly set Ryder on the path to becoming a movie star.

Winona Ryder had a rough time in her 30s

After her first film role, Ryder would later find herself as one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars. Her adolescent and young adult years saw her headlining projects like Edward Scissorhands, Heathers, and many other acclaimed movies.

But the success she had as a teenager and in her 20s affected the career she had in her 30s in a negative way. Seeing as she looked younger than her age when she reached 30, it was difficult getting certain roles.

“My early thirties were rough,” she once told Red (via Contact Music). “I went through stuff that I would have gone through, and probably should have gone through much younger, but I had spent my 20s working. Even when I was the right age for older roles, people thought of me as being younger. It was tough because I’d had so much success in my early 20s.”

Ryder would also revisit the challenges she faced in her 30s in a 2015 interview with Vogue. There, the film star expressed her relief with being able to play characters closer to her age.

“I feel like lately I’ve been sort of liberated into being able to finally play my own age, which has been really nice,” she said.

Winona Ryder embraces aging

Getting older isn’t something that Ryder is concerned about. The Stranger Things star believed that aging should be a time for celebration for all women regardless of occupation. Even when she was a kid, Ryder welcomed the idea of maturing.

“Of course, it’s nice and flattering to have people come up to me and bring up old movies I did. I’ve been embracing aging. I always have, since I was a kid,” she said. “When you’re the kid on the set for so long, you just, like, daydream about being older. I do feel like there are opportunities and it’s really sort of up to audiences and then studios and filmmakers to tell stories using actual women of the right age.”