Winona Ryder is Still Processing

The Stranger Things star on coming to terms with the past, making sense of the present, and what to do when you find yourself in the Hollywood version of the upside down

- By Heather Havrilesky

When Winona Ryder was a kid, she daydreamed about movies-not starring in them, but watching and filming them. Her parents, who are both writers and editors, moved to a commune on the Northern California coast when she was seven, and though there were no TVs, her mother would put up a sheet on the side of a barn to show old movies. "I was in heaven," Ryder says. After her family moved a few years later to Petaluma, a city in the San Francisco Bay Area, she would try to view the world through the camera's lens. "There's this bridge there. It looks so small now," Ryder says. "But I used to put the strap of my book bag across my forehead. I'd sort of walk and force myself to see things in black and white, like a movie."

"I created this whole kind of fantasy world," she explains. "There was an old theater I loved, and I used to fantasize about living there. Like, ripping out the seats and having a bed and a bathtub and a bike and watching movies all the time."

It's telling that Ryder's childhood daydreams were the products of an expansive, freewheeling imagination. Her knowledge of film, music, books, and pop culture, in general, is sprawling.

"It's just kind of epic how wild her mind is and how it goes to all these different corners," marvels David Harbour, who plays former police chief Jim Hopper, Ryder's would-be love interest on Stranger Things, the nostalgic sci-fi Netflix series set in the '80s that recently returned for its fourth season and has catapulted Ryder back into the spotlight.