It's Winona! - Winona Ryder on revisiting Beetlejuice, sticking it out in Hollywood, and staying off social media

Winona Ryder on revisiting Beetlejuice, sticking it out in Hollywood, and staying off social media. Now 52, Ryder is in a much different place in her life and work, inhabiting more of an elder-stateswoman role. She refuses, for example, to wear heels on the red carpet, preferring to style herself (a rarity in Hollywood), either hiding her boots with a floor-length dress or incorporating them into her outfit. "I actually made a conscious decision, maybe six years ago," she says.

- By Thessaly La Force- Photographed by Liv Liberg - Styling by Vanessa Reid

It is a warm afternoon in late spring, and Winona Ryder and I are walking through the Oakland Cemetery, a Victorianstyle graveyard located in the center of Atlanta. Large oak and magnolia trees shade the manicured paths as we stroll between the grand mausoleums and tombstones. Ryder is wearing a straw bonnet, with a well-worn Leonard Cohen T-shirt under a black chore jacket that has a pin of a cartoon drawing of Jim Jarmusch affixed to its lapel. Her eyes are rimmed with eyeliner, and her sneakers are splattered with paint. Ryder is the first to admit that the word icon has become overused: "Everyone uses it now, and they don't know what a real icon is," she says. But she looks, as she always has, like the poster child for Gen X. She defined cinema in the '90s, embodying both a romantic moodiness and an idealistic dissatisfaction that few other actors have rivaled.

Gazing at the final resting places of others tends to prompt questions of longevity. Ryder stops to read from a headstone: "Life so fully lived, haven't had to wait. Gone fishing." She tells me she has a deep admiration for the late actress Ruth Gordon, who won an Academy Award when she was 72 for Rosemary's Baby and worked well into her 80s. In past interviews, Ryder has said that she's ready for her "Ruth Gordon years," an allusion to a lengthy career that many who enter the industry as ingenues, as Ryder did to some extent, rarely pull off. When she was 13, she auditioned for the role of Rina in what would become her first film, Lucas, which came out in 1986. Rina, she recalls, was written in the script as unattractive. This didn't deter her. "I wasn't hurt by it," she says. "I was more like, 'Oh, cool. Can I be Ruth Gordon?"