- - Winona Ryder Says She Lost Out on a Movie with Marlon Brando Because She 'Wasn’t Gonna Apologize’ for “Heathers”

Victoria EdelJuly 25, 2025 at 10:15 PM

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Winona Ryder in 'Heathers'

Winona Ryder’s career would have looked different if she hadn’t done Heathers.

Ryder, 53, opened up about her career in an interview with Elle UK, published July 23. The actress starred in the dark comedy Heathers in 1989, playing Veronica Sawyer. Veronica teams up with Christian Slater’s J.D. to get revenge on Kim Walker’s Heather Chandler, and J.D. ends up killing her. After they stage it as a suicide, J.D.’s quest for revenge ramps up, with more deadly consequences. The movie’s plot involves gun violence, eating disorders, sexuality and murder — while still being full of jokes.

“I was told I was never gonna work again if I did Heathers,” Ryder, who had found success as a child star, told the outlet of the film, which is now widely considered a high school classic. Then she admitted, “I did lose a job.”

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Marlon Brando in 'The Freshman'

Ryder didn’t want to say, but since it was 35 years ago, she eventually gave in. It turned out the movie was the 1990 movie The Freshman, which starred Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick. She was offered a role, but then the people behind the movie saw Heathers.

“They thought it was making fun of teen suicide. They were deeply offended and, yeah, they revoked the offer,” she remembered. “I’m like, ‘I can’t work with Marlon Brando?’ ” she said, using a weepy voice.

But she stood firm in her choices. “But I had to stand my ground. I wasn’t gonna apologize,” she said. The Stranger Things star admitted Heathers is one of her favorite projects, and she said if she sees Heathers on TV, she never turns it off. “I know it basically by heart.”

Heathers director, Michael Lehmann, defended Heathers’ mix of dark crimes and comedy in a 2016 interview with The Denver Post. “The more horrifying or disturbing human behavior is, the more opportunity there is to mine it for certain types of comedy,” he said. “You click it a few notches in one direction or another to make it absurd, and it allows to you to understand human behavior better, because people do horrible things with the best intentions.”

“When it came out a lot of people were very upset and there was a big politically correct backlash saying, ‘How dare you make fun of teenage suicide!’ ” Lehmann said. “But Columbine hadn’t happened yet. And anyway, we weren’t making fun of teenage suicide, we were making a comedy about the way teenagers are perceived by adults and how they behave to each other.”

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Winona Ryder in 2024

Heathers found even more fans when it was adapted into a musical in the 2010s. The musical returned to New York this summer.

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Despite getting cut from The Freshman, Ryder’s career kept chugging along after Heathers, with 1990’s Edward Scissorhands and Mermaids. She received back-to-back Emmy nominations for her role in two novel adaptations: 1993’s The Age of Innocence and 1994’s Little Women.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”