Winona Ryder Admits She Was In A Dark Place After Johnny Depp Breakup: ‘I Wasn’t Taking Care Of Myself’

In the early ’90s, there was no Hollywood power couple that captivated fans quite like Winona Ryder and Johnny Depp. Just five months after meeting in 1989, the two became engaged, but after four years, they decided to call it off and go their separate ways.

While the actress, 50, hasn’t commented much on their relationship, in a new interview, she offered a bit of insight as to how she handled the aftermath.

“That was my Girl, Interrupted real life,” she confessed to Harper’s Bazaar, referencing her movie that takes place in a psychiatric hospital.

When she was still fresh off the heartbreak, she began filming The House of the Spirits, where she played a “character who ends up getting tortured in a Chilean prison.” At the time, a therapist encouraged Ryder to think about how she would treat a younger version of herself.

 

“I would look at these fake bruises and cuts on my face [from the shoot], and I would struggle to see myself as this little girl. ‘Would you be treating this girl like you’re treating yourself?’” she recalled. “I remember looking at myself and saying, ‘This is what I’m doing to myself inside.’ Because I just wasn’t taking care of myself.”

Her Age of Innocence costar Michelle Pfeiffer noticed her downcast demeanor as well, and though she tried to help lift the Oscar nominee’s spirits, her words went in one ear and out the other.

“I remember Michelle being like, ‘This is going to pass.’ But I couldn’t hear it,” explained the Stranger Things star.

 

These days, she harbors nothing but good feelings towards the Pirates of the Caribbean actor, 59. “I truly and honestly only know him as a really good man,” she insisted two years ago. “An incredibly loving, extremely caring guy who was so very protective of me.”

The Little Women star has been in a solid romance with fashion designer Scott Mackinlay since 2011, and though they may not talk about their relationship too often, he’s tagged along for several of Ryder’s Hollywood events, most recently venturing out to the Stranger Things season 4 premiere in NYC in May.