Winona Ryder says Keanu Reeves refused to verbally abuse her on Dracula set
It's not like the internet needed more reasons to love Keanu Reeves, but Winona Ryder is here to provide anyway.
During a recent interview with the Sunday Times, Ryder recounted an incident on the set of Bram Stoker's Dracula in which director Francis Ford Coppola urged the other actors on set to join him in heaping verbal abuse upon her to elicit an emotional response. Ryder said costars Reeves and Anthony Hopkins, however, refused to join in.
The scene in question finds Ryder's character lying on a bed with Dracula (Gary Oldman), and he turns into a bunch of rats. Off camera, Ryder said, Coppola was shouting, "You whore! You whore!" in an attempt to get her to cry. "To put it in context I'm supposed to be crying," she told the Times. "Literally, Richard E. Grant, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu… Francis was trying to get all of them to yell things that would make me cry. But Keanu wouldn't, Anthony wouldn't… the more it happened, I was like… It just didn't work. I was, like, really? It kind of did the opposite."
Everett Collection
Ryder added that she and Coppola are "good now," but considering Reeves' kindness to her, it's clear why the two still have a tight friendship. The've starred in three additional films together: A Scanner Darkly (2006), The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009), and Destination Wedding (2018).
Back in August, Ryder even told EW she thought it was possible she and Reeves were married in the eyes of the Romanian church. "We actually got married in Dracula. No, I swear to God, I think we're married in real life," she said. "In that scene, Francis used a real Romanian priest. We shot the master [shot] and he did the whole thing. So I think we're married."
The supposition has remained a lighthearted joke between the two. While on The Talk in 2019, Reeves said Ryder sometimes playfully refers to him as "husband," sending him texts with the moniker.
It seems Dracula didn't suck when it came to forging an enduring friendship between Reeves and Ryder on multiple levels.
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