Winona Ryder recently sat down with V Magazine to talk about her up-coming biker chick role in the movie, “Homefront“. She also opened up about her past, and how she was mistaken for a boy and was gay bashed by a group of young boys during her time at Kenilworth Junior High School In Petaluma, California. She also opened up about her past, and how she was mistaken for a boy and was gay bashed by a group of young boys during her time at Kenilworth Junior High School In Petaluma, California.

“The lore! That did happen,” she told the magazine. “I was obsessed with Bugsy Malone and had cut my hair short. I remember the halls were empty and these kids started shouting ‘faggot,’ and I didn’t think they were talking to me. Walking home after leaving the nurse’s office—and I’ve never talked about this—I remember pressing on the bandage because I wanted it to look more dramatic. I had this inner monologue going of Humphrey Bogart, like, ‘being roughed up!’ I was pretending I was in some gangster movie. It was oddly my way of dealing with it, because if I didn’t, I probably would have been really scared.”

After the assault, Ryder dropped out of school and proceeded to be home schooled by her mother. Her parents enrolled her in the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, and that is where she got her big break and was cast in her first movie, “Lucas”. Ryder says it was fate that those boys attacked her that day. “Had I not been homeschooled I would not have been able to go. It’s almost weird fate that it happened that way.”

Ryder has since made a name for herself in the film industry, starring in over 50 films. She says she sometimes still struggles in the industry and trying to stay relevant.

“It used to be that you commit to something and then basically you spend your year doing that. Now there’s a constant conversation of how you have to keep working in order to remind people that you’re around. You have to work to be relevant. If you don’t then people will forget and the studios won’t want you because they won’t remember the last thing you did that made money,” she said.

Image via Wikimedia Commons