Winona Ryder has long been familiar with fame — and with sorrow. In Stranger Things, which debuted on Netflix in 2016, she portrays Joyce Byers, a devastated mother desperately searching for her missing son, Will Byers (Noah Schnapp). When Ryder set out to embody Joyce’s anguish, she drew from a deeply personal memory — a tragedy that struck someone she once knew.
Credit: Aidan Cullen/Interview Magazine
In her conversation for the winter issue of Interview Magazine, Ryder recalled the disappearance of Polly Klaas, a young girl from Petaluma, California, the town where the actress spent her childhood.
“I had this experience when I was in my early twenties: There was a girl from the town that I grew up in,” Ryder said. “Her name was Polly Klaas, and she was kidnapped. I knew her family.”
Polly, only 12 at the time, was abducted at knifepoint by Richard Allen, who broke into her mother’s home during a sleepover on October 1, 1993. Ryder explained that she tried to support the family however she could, even offering a $200,000 reward to help bring Polly home. But two months later, on December 4, 1993, the search ended in tragedy when the girl’s body was discovered near Cloverdale, roughly 35 miles from Petaluma.
“When you’re around that kind of tangible grief, it’s otherworldly,” Ryder said. “She wanted to be an actress, and her favorite book was Little Women, so that was a big reason I did that movie and dedicated it to her.”
Because the real-life loss had affected her so deeply, Winona Ryder was initially uneasy about the premise of Stranger Things. She wanted creators Matt and Ross Duffer to fully grasp the emotional weight of a missing child storyline and to approach it with sensitivity. She even spoke with Polly’s father, Marc Klaas, while shaping Joyce’s emotional journey.
“I was actually really freaked out with Stranger Things, because I wanted them to know how f***ing serious that is, and that you can’t use disappearances as a tool to advance — it feels very personal,” she told Interview. “I also talked to Polly’s dad, and a lot of my performance in that first season was connected to him. I worked really, really hard that first season, and then the show took off in a way that I have certainly never been a part of.”
Credit: Aidan Cullen/Interview Magazine
Winona Ryder added that she eventually found relief once the story expanded beyond Joyce’s arc: “I remember having a moment that was really liberating and relieving, when I realized the show was no longer about me.”
Season 1 centers on Will’s disappearance and the determined efforts of his mother — along with his friends Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) — to uncover what happened to him. As Ryder poured intense emotion into her role, she also forged strong bonds with the young cast members.
“I was watching these kids at this tender age getting enormous attention that would be overwhelming for anybody and feeling really protective and concerned, because I went through it,” Ryder told Interview. “But it wasn’t similar at all, because technology and social media have completely changed everything.”
