Winona Ryder shared a rare insight into a key moment of her stardom and she reveals why she disappeared from Hollywood.
The 52-year-old actress disappeared from Hollywood amid the backlash she received following her shoplifting arrest in December 2001.
The arrest “definitely had a giant effect,” Winona said in a new interview with Esquire, this Thursday, August 29.
Notably, the Girl, Interrupted actress was charged with shoplifting clothes worth $5,500 from a Saks Fifth Avenue store in Beverly Hills, California. She was convicted and sentenced to three years probation, fines, and community service.
At the time, Ryder disappeared from the public eye and moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
When asked how she dealt with her arrest, she said “I checked out, I think I just checked out.”
The news of her possible arrest came as a shock to the Black Swan actress. She remembers being baffled when she was told she was going to go to prison, she said, “I was like, ‘Huh? What are you talking about?’”
“It kept being like, ‘Oh, it’s fine, this is just, like, paperwork,’ and I was like, ‘OK.’ I was so confused.”
Moreover, she shared that returning to Hollywood was not an easy feat for her, saying, “There was a period when I was not in season.”
“Psychologically, I must have been at a place where I just wanted to stop,” she went on.
“I won’t get into what happened, but it wasn’t what people think. And it wasn’t like the crime of the century! But it allowed me time that I really needed, where I went back to San Francisco and got back into things that … I just had other interests, frankly.”
Ryder made her big comeback to the screen with her role in the early 2000s, as she took on the role of Joyce Byers in Netflix’s Stranger Things.
