Christina Ricci Looks Back on Winona Ryder and Johnny Depp’s On-Set Life Lesson

Christina Ricci recently took a stroll down memory lane and reflected on a time when Winona Ryder and Johnny Depp taught her a valuable life lesson. Speaking to Andy Cohen on his SiriusXM show, Ricci looked back on a situation when she was working on the 1990 dramedy Mermaids with Cher and Ryder. The actress, now 42, was an adolescent at the time, and somehow the term “homophobic” came up. Unsure of what the word meant, Ricci went to Ryder for guidance.

“There was something going on on-set and someone was not being nice to someone else,” Ricci explained to Cohen. “And they were like, ‘Oh, well, he might be homophobic.’ And then I was like, ‘Well, I don’t understand what that is.’ And I was in Winona’s trailer and she was like, ‘I don’t know how … ‘ so she put me on the phone with Johnny. And Johnny explained it to me.” The host, seemingly shocked, replied, “That’s incredible.”

“Yeah. And like the simplest terms … yeah,” Ricci went on to say. “He was like, ‘It’s when a man wants to have sex with a man. And when a woman wants to have sex with a woman’ and I was like, ‘Ah, OK.’” Cohen chimed in again on Depp’s “sweet” gesture, adding, “I bet Johnny Depp explained it well.” Ricci replied, “Just very matter of factly. Like I just did.” 

Cohen then joked that the actress could have just taken a walk down to Cher’s dressing room area and asked the same question. “I love it that Winona Ryder had to put you on the phone with Johnny Depp to get that story, that she couldn’t spit it out in some way, or, I mean, you’ve got Cher in the next trailer!” Notably, less than 10 years later Ricci and Depp worked together on the 1998 film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Following her film debut in Mermaids, Ricci went on to star in dozens of major film and TV projects, most recently appearing in the critically acclaimed Showtime series Yellowjackets. The hit drama series “tells the narrative of a team of wildly talented high-school girls soccer players who survive a plane crash deep in the Ontario wilderness. The series chronicles their descent from a complicated but thriving team to warring, cannibalistic clans, while also tracking the lives they have attempted to piece back together.”

The young versions of the main characters are played by Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Thatcher and Sammi Hanratty star as the teenagers, with Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Ricci and Juliette Lewis portraying “their adult counterparts as they reveal the truth about their survival 25 years later.” Season 1 of Yellowjackets is now streaming on Showtime Anytime.