What could have been! Winona Ryder wasn’t the first choice to play Veronica Sawyer in the 1988 flick Heathers — because of her looks. The actress recently opened up about the audition process with Tavi Gevinson for Interview magazine.
“I auditioned and they were like, ‘Oh, thanks.’ And I went to the Beverly Center to Macy’s and had them do a makeover on me,” Ryder, 44, explained. “I went back because I kind of knew that they thought I wasn’t pretty enough. They were trying to get Jennifer Connelly.”
Ryder didn’t pout in a corner, though. Instead, she begged the producers for the role. “I remember actually saying to them, ‘I don’t care if it even comes out. I just want to say the words. You don’t have to pay me.’ That was the only time that I wanted something so bad,” she recalled.
She added of the movie: “I was completely obsessed with it.”
Heathers is about a good girl (Veronica) who gets fed up with a popular clique (centered around three girls all named Heather) in high school. In retaliation, she and her boyfriend J.D. (Christian Slater) plot to kill them, staging each death as a suicide.
The Michael Lehmann–directed dark comedy also starred Kim Walker, Shannen Doherty and Lisanne Falk (Heather number one, two and three, respectively), and inspired the Off-Broadway show Heathers: The Musical, which debuted in 2010 and ended in 2014.
