Winona Recalls First Meeting Harvey Weinstein: ‘He Didn’t Like Me’

Winona Ryder was blacklisted in the 1990s by now-jailed movie mogul Harvey Weinstein for allegedly insulting him when she tried to shake his hand the first time they met.

“He didn’t like me,” she said in an interview with Esquire published Thursday.

“The one time I had a meeting with (Harvey), I went into the Miramax office and stuck my hand out. He shook my hand and I sat down on the couch and we had a conversation and I left,” Ryder recalled.

She said an officer then “screamed” at her: “What the f–k did you do?”

“Apparently I offended him because I stuck my hand out,” the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” and “Stranger Things” actress explained.

But that wasn’t her last encounter with him. While she was filming the 1993 Miramax movie “The House of the Spirits,” he knocked on her trailer door and told her he wanted her to star in his film adaptation of the play “Little Voice.”

“And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I just saw that in London.’ I thought, ‘You’ve got to cast that girl (from the play), Jane Horrocks. She’s f–king amazing.’ And he got really weirded out and he left.” (As Ryder suggested, Horrocks was cast in the film, which was released in 1998.)

Ryder also cryptically said that the reason he wouldn’t hire her and told other producers not to cast her was because “I think I knew a little too much.”

While Ryder made it clear that she was never sexually harassed or assaulted by Weinstein, she said that when she was in her late 20s, “I had some difficult experiences with some people who outright sexually harassed me.”

She recalled another incident that happened when she was in her 30s. “It wasn’t an assault. But it was incredibly inappropriate. It was wild. I really understand (what victims of Weinstein and others have gone through). I was lucky because I was well-known, so it didn’t happen as often as it might have if I were a struggling actor. But I remember this feeling in your head: You’re negotiating, you’re thinking about what’s going to happen if you say something. You’re working it out while this person is being extremely creepy.”

Ryder told her “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” co-star Jenna Ortega about what happened to her when she was her age and it hit her. “As I was saying it, I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, that is f–ked up.’”

The actress, who reprises her role as Lydia Deetz in Tim Burton’s sequel out September 6, said: “If someone was being inappropriate or came up to me drunk, I was like, ‘Ha ha! ‘ That’s what you do. ‘Ha ha! ‘ Inappropriate? I’ve dealt with that. But touching me? That felt very intrusive.”