Winona Ryder ‘Prides Herself’ on ‘Being Picky’ With Roles: Overwork Is ‘a Recipe for Disaster’

Winona Ryder has no shortage of offers now that Stranger Things has fully wrapped, but a source exclusively tells Closer she’s happy to stay under the radar and enjoy a private life with partner Scott MacKinlay Hahn far away from prying eyes. 

“Winona just had one of the biggest hits of her career with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the ongoing success of Stranger Things has made her wealthier than she ever expected, but she still prefers to take as much as six months off each year and she has designed her life in Northern California to be very comfortable and relaxing,” the source says. “She doesn’t need to go on long, exotic vacations to recharge her batteries, she just needs to chill out with Scott at the home they have spent years putting together.” 

Winona, 53, began a fairly private relationship with her beau in 2011. What little she does say publicly about the fashion designer, who is barely active on social media himself, has been all praise. “He’s so great. He really is. I’m really lucky,” the Beetlejuice star gushed during an interview with Harper’s Bazaar in July 2024.

The source notes that staying out of the spotlight and hanging out at home with Scott is more than enough for the actress, who encountered some serious career setbacks in the early 2000s, including an arrest for shoplifting in December 2001 that made it difficult for studios to find insurance with her as a lead for a few years, before a huge resurgence in the 2010s.

“Winona is more in demand than ever and has a lot of opportunities, especially now that she has wrapped her final scenes on Stranger Things,” the insider explains. “T.V. has made her rich, but movies are her first love and she definitely has a few more great ones she wants to make.” 

A second source previously discussed Winona’s future plans as she comes off the gas pedal a bit and begins to slow her work down, saying she intends “to grow her fortune into old age through traditional investments in residential real estate and even flipping homes.” That source added the actress is forever grateful for the television windfall in her career’s second act, but “just because Winona was one of the first people to even care about or believe in the potential of Stranger Things does not mean she’s foolish enough to think another hit of that magnitude will just fall in her lap.”

With a much more aloof approach to her upcoming projects, the first insider adds, “Winona is not going the Nicole Kidman route and making three movies and two miniseries every year, even though she knows she could.” 

“She prides herself in being picky and, again, it’s all about the downtime for her, sleeping in, going to her favorite neighborhood restaurants. If she were a workaholic who had to fill every waking moment, she just wouldn’t be the Winona everybody knows and still loves. She doesn’t need to be doing a million things at once. For her, that would be a recipe for disaster.”