Winona Ryder has clung to a piece of chicken bone that Christopher Walken once gave her for years.
While Ryder, 53, reflected on her decades-long career in Hollywood, brushes with difficult directors and teenaged fame in an Elle cover story published Wednesday, July 23, the actress shared an odd-sounding anecdote. As the outlet reported, Ryder — who worked with Walken, 82, on the 2014 BBC film Turks & Caicos — said “that she was once so besotted with [Walken] that when he gave her a rotisserie chicken from a supermarket she kept the carcass a weirdly long time because it came from him.”
“I still have the wishbone and am trying to make it into a necklace,” Ryder told Elle via a text message when the magazine followed up to ensure they understood her story correctly.
Ryder and Walken both appeared in Turks & Caicos, the second entry in a spy trilogy starring Bill Nighy that the BBC produced in the 2010s. It’s unclear whether Ryder and Walken split the aforementioned rotisserie chicken while working together on that movie.
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Winona Ryder
Ryder dished on another bona fide celebrity crush elsewhere in the Elle cover story, when she admitted that she fell “actively in love with” Al Pacino in her early 20s. At the time, she and Pacino, now 85, were working on a workshop for a production of the William Shakespeare play Richard III. (The workshop was later utilized for Pacino’s 1996 directorial debut, Looking for Richard.)
“He was obsessed with coffee, and he would take me all over New York – like, to the weirdest places – to try different coffees. I’m 22, or whatever,” Ryder recalled. “Finally, he’s dropping me off wherever I’m staying, and I’m like, ‘I love you, you know. I really am completely in love with you.’ “And he was like ‘Aw, honey, noooo.’ Then, like 10 years later, I meet his girlfriend, who’s younger than me.”
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” ‘Dude, I’m f—— throwing myself at you,’ ” Ryder recalled thinking, before noting, “I still play poker with [Pacino] sometimes. It’s the best.”
Ryder most recently appeared on the big screen in 2024’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which reunited her with collaborator Tim Burton and saw her reprise a fan-favorite role as protagonist Lydia Deetz. Later this year, Ryder will portray her Stranger Things character Joyce Byers one more time in the popular Netflix series’ fifth and final season, which releases in three parts on Nov. 26, Dec. 25 and Dec. 31.
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