Winona Ryder says Keanu Reeves refused Coppola's orders to hurl abuses at her until she cried on 'Dracula' set
Winona Ryder recently revealed that Keanu Reeves had refused to listen to Francis Ford Coppola's request to hurl abuses at her until she cried while on the sets of 'Dracula'. Both Ryder and Reeves had starred alongside each other in Coppola's 1992 adaptation of Bram Stroker's 'Dracula'. Ryder had played the role of Mina Harker, who was Dracula's main obsession, while Reeves had played the role of her fiancé.
During an interview with The Sunday Times, Ryder recalled a scene where Dracula, who was played by Gary Oldman, would transform into a pile of rats. In order to make her crying believable, director Coppola would shout out insults including, "You whore!" at her. He would also have the film's male cast do the same. Ryder said, "To put it in context, I'm supposed to be crying. Literally, Richard R 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 ... It just didn't work. I was, like, really? It kind of did the opposite."
She revealed that she and Coppola are "good now" and that the experience led to a longtime friendship with Reeves. The two have worked together three more times in 'A Scanner Darkly' in 2006, 'The Private Lives of Pippa Lee' in 2009 and 'Destination Wedding' in 2018. The movie 'Destination Wedding' featured the pair playing two guests at a wedding who hate each other, the bride, the groom, and everything but slowly get together. Ryder said that the film received bad reviews, which were difficult to hear.
"It got the worst reviews. That movie, for some reason, every reviewer was like, ‘This is the worst movie in the world,’ and it was really rough," she said. It should come as no surprise that Reeves is a thoughtful and kind person with many reports stating that he is very respectful towards women. Back in 2019, his fans on Twitter noticed how he would never hold a woman by the waist but would hover his hands above their lower back. We had earlier reported that a stuntman for Reeves said that all the nice things heard about the 'The Matrix' star are all actually true. The stuntman, Jeremy Fry, said that he and Reeves developed a bond together over the course of their work.
While speaking to Metro, Fry said of Reeves, "[Reeves] He is a giver, he is selfless, he works tirelessly. Every good thing you’ve heard about him is 110% true." He also recalled how the two had bonded over their love for motorcycles. "He goes, ‘Hey, how would you like to go to Laguna Seca?’ and when Keanu Reeves asks you if you wanna go pretty much anywhere, you say yes. Turns out he had rented Laguna Seca, which is a very well-known popular racetrack in California, and he rented it for two days, private rental, there were about eighty of his friends and people he knew." "There were celebrities there, people from different industries there, a huge cross-section of people. He put us up in local hotels, he catered breakfast, lunch, dinners."