Winona Ryder: Drowning, Designer Theft, and a Deadly Kidnapping

northern California. Her godfather was LSD pioneer Timothy Leary, aka the Most Dangerous Man in America. Winnowna's unique upbringing molded her into an A list actress and into America's endearing weirdo.

Her weirdness drew from the deep fears that she experienced when assimilating from a sheltered early childhood to a more typical nineteen eighties media overload when her family moved to California, and when one of those fears came true in her new California hometown, she found herself in an unlikely role trying to draw attention to a horrific crime to help

solve a kidnapping case. Before and after her involvement in that case, Winoda Ryder made great films and Winna Rider made time with some great musicians as well, musicians who, well, you know what I'm gonna say, musicians who made great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melotron called Johnny Forever MK one. I played you that loop because I can't afford the

rights to dream Lover by my Mariah Carey. And why would I play you that specific slice of five octave cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on October first, nineteen ninety three, and that was the day Polyclass was abducted from her home, opening a kidnapping case that would rattle California and Winona Ryder to her core. On this episode, near Drowning Designer theft a deadly kidnapping in America's Ald Sweetheart, Winona Ryder,

I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgraceland. Winona Rider had seconds to determine whether she was going to live or die. The seconds ticked by slowly and the undertoe moved quickly, a current with Winona's body around like a rag doll that yanked her in circles, shook her like a snow gloab, and the ocean closed in on her from every angle. It dragged her farther into the deep five feet below ten feet below. Win Ona wasn't sure, but she knew she was fully submerged. Down, was up? Left? Was right?

She spun until she had no clue which direction would lead her to safety. This was not a riptide. Winona Rider could not calmly bob the surface of the water and flag down help someone who could pull her back up the shore. She was caught in the undertoe, and the incoming waves bent Winona to their will, thrashed her arms and legs. She was motivated entirely by desperation. She struggled to wriggle free from the ocean's grasp, and the more she jerked her body around, the harder it was

to focus. Keeping her mouth clamped shut, she held out as long as she could. She clung to one thought, don't breathe, don't breathe, and the sudden yank of the undertoe pried open her lips anyways, a silent scream. A stream of air bubbles from her mouth, more than she ever knew she had in her Her air supply was racing towards the surface, and there was only water now. A surge of seawater gushed into her mouth. The salt seared her windpipe as it forced its way into her lungs.

Winoda couldn't stop the flow. It burrowed into her chest, deeper and deeper, until it felt like her lungs would pop. She choked as her body tried to cough, tried to puke, tried to do anything that would stop her from sinking to the ocean floor. Pruney and ragged, lungs ready to rupture, Winona's limbs slipped away. She lost all feeling in her arms and legs. She surrendered to the ocean. She surrendered to the ability to feel much of anything at all.

Her peripheral vision darkened. Black curtains shrouded her sight. Her view narrowed to a fine tunnel a thousand yards long, and she stared down the corridor, empty, quiet, numb. She didn't feel it what. A lifeguard hoisted her from the water and laid her down on the sandy beach. Her body was limp, her skin a ghastly shade of porcelain. She had no pulse. Twelve year old Winona Rider was dead.

The lifeguard started to perform CPR, even though she looked like a lost cause, it was what he was trained to do. He pushed down on her chest over and over. He tilted her head back, pinched her nose tight with his fingers, put his mouth on her blue lips, and tried to breathe life back into her. Suddenly she twitched to life. She shot salt water into the sand by

the mouthful. Winona's friends watched from the sidelines, stupefied or too stone to understand the severity of what had just happened, what almost happened, and their glazed eyes watched the vomit bring a blush of color back to Winona's cheeks, and then a thought dangled in the back of their daised minds, our parents are going to fucking kill us. This was the mid nineteen eighties. There were no smartphones, there was no internet. It was easy for preteens to go missing

for a few hours. In fact, it was expected. Legions of suburban latch key kids went to school, came home if they felt like it, fucked off down to the river or into the woods, or even to the beach, and just be home by dinner. And looking back at the eighties from the twenty twenty two point of view, it might seem like disconnection was standard operating procedure, and it kind of was. You might not even notice that the kids were missing until the street lights came on.

That's what Winona Ryder and her friends were counting on when they cut class or that day. The group left the drama of Junior High in their lockers and rolled up to Dylan Beach instead, where they rolled the skinny joint and sunned their stone cells on the shore. Young Wenona declined the drugs. She embraced the ocean instead, right until the undertow hugged her back so tightly that it almost didn't let her go. Winona survived that day barely.

The cold clench of death lingered in her bones. Later that evening, she felt it prying at her skin, pulling her under. Fresh dose of fear followed her home to Petaluma, trailed her like a shadow, climbed into bed with her laid by her side, like an old friend, right next to all her other old childhood fears. The tally in her head was impressive. There was the Holocaust, for one, the horrors of Nazi Germany that claimed so many of

our ancestors. No one could convince Monona those ghosts weren't real. There was also the ever present fear of nuclear annihilation, but that was nothing that the ordinary for all kids in the nineteen eighties. Then there were the neighbors. She wanted to get inside their heads, know what they thought when her parents hippie van pulled into the driveway every day. What they thought of this new family. Some implants plucked

from a progressive commune in northern California. Well, commune wasn't even the right word, but that's what everyone kept calling it. Commune sounded like a cult, and there was no cult where Winona came from. That was a flat out misconception. Other details were correct, though it was true that her last home had no electricity, no phone, no TV. Winnoona's hippie parents replaced technology with freethinking, traded the paranoia of broadcast news with nature. It was idyllic, idyllic until you

tried to explain it to anyone else. Winona worried the neighbors would misunderstand their family conspire against them. She wondered if they would connect the dots that her godfather was quote the most dangerous man in America on quote well, according to Richard Nixon. Anyway, Wanova's parents appointed psychologists and LSD advocate Timothy Leary as her godfather, the guru of

turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. He told Wanona to question everything, so she did, just like she was in bed right now, wide eyed, staring at the ceiling, driving herself right up the wall, questioning. Sleep frequently escaped her. Winoa didn't know the word insomnia. Yet, What if the neighbors turned on us? She thought? What if they try to lock us away? There was another question burning a hole in Wanona's restless mind. Why did children keep disappearing

in California? That was the one fear that dwarfed all the others, the one that tortured her every time she indulged in the new luxury of watching television. Winona Rider's worst fear was getting kidnapped. Gone were the days of living in a secluded bubble cozy amongst the company of her parents and their fellow freethinking friends. Now that Wenoda lived in Petaluma, California, she heard everything. There was no shelter from reality, not with a TV in the house

beckoning to her at all hours. Kidnappings colored the screen on a regular basis. Some cases went in circles for months until they reached a tragic dead end emphasis on dead. Others never ended at all. Winona knew some of the victims' names by heart. Tara Burke, three years old, held in captivity for ten months by sexual predators. Stephen Stainer, seven years old, trapped for seven years by a child molester.

He only escaped because the sick bastard who abducted him wanted to lure in another boy, and the two kids made a mad dash together. Then there was Kevin Collins, ten years old. He was from the same neighborhood as Wenona, her older sister, even babysat at once. His buck to smile was printed across billboards in National magazine covers a literal milk curtain kid. He was still out there somewhere, dead or alive. Nobody knew, No one might ever know.

The chill of fear burrowed deeper into winter on his bones. She pulled the covers over her head. Her fingers trembled, but no one could convince her she was overreacting, that her fears were unrealistic or childish. She almost died today. Anything could happen to anyone without rhyme or reason, and that might be the part that scared her the most. His blood ran cold when he saw the red and blue flicker against the trees. The colors were getting brighter

and deeper. He knew the cops would show up eventually. It wasn't a matter of if, it was a matter of when. Deep breaths, he coached himself. He casually leaned against the hood of his car as the cruiser pulled over. He paced his breathing. He practiced his story in his head. But Richard Davis still didn't feel prepared sightseeing. He was just sightseeing, that's all. Pulled over to admire the great outdoors on a warm evening. Then he realized that sedan

was stuck in a ditch. Wrestled with the damn car for hours, even crawled underneath at one point. Benny here Ever since, Yeah, that would work, Davis recited the story word for word. When a pair of police officers approached him. Their version of the story was slightly different. They had received a call about a mysterious man camped out on the side of the road on private property. It was

all over the police scanner that night, Channel three. To be precise, Channel three covered all the Sonoma Valley San Pablo Bay to Santa Rosa, but it did not extend to Pedaluma, a city seventeen miles away. In Pedaluma, the scanner had different. In Petaluma, a twelve year old girl had been kidnapped by a stranger, the very same girl Richard Davis just dumped in the woods. Little polyclass left

a window open on October first, nineteen ninety three. Or maybe her mother left at a jar right before passing out on a sleeping pill to escape a tedious migraine. Didn't matter, it was too late now. The window offered an invitation, and Richard Davis accepted it. He made quick clean work. He slithered right through the open window and into the house. Picked up a knife in the kitchen, He cut the chords from video game controllers, ripped up

some bed sheets too. He'd need binding materials for this to go smoothly, and the strips of cloth did not to be big children had itty bitty wrists and ankles. Davis barged into Polly's bedroom as the family clock chimed. Ten thirty PM may as well be midnight to a twelve year old, or so Davis thought. He wasn't expecting to find Polly's slumber party just heating it up. Davis saw a panic flood the eyes of every girl in

the room. He lingered in the doorway, the edge of the knife glimmered against the glow of Polly's clamshell night light. Davis kept his instructions simple. Scream and I'll slit your throats. They obeyed, shaking in silence. Davis then bound and gagged each girl, tied them up with their own sheets and video game cables, and then he bagged their heads with pillowcases. From Polly's bed. He blinded all the girls except Polly. He had other plans for her. Davis bent down on

his knees, eye level with the trembling hoods. Count to one thousand. He ordered, Polly will be back by then. Polly would not be back. Polly was tied up in the woods in Santa Rosa, California, and the local police force had no idea all because they were tuned to the wrong channel on the police scanner, Channel three. One cop used a flashlight to look Davis up and down. Leaves and twigs poked out of his shaggy haircut, beads of sweat on his cheeks. His body language betrayed him.

Davis just looked nervous, not car tutel. Nervous, like when you're stranded at midnight with a flat the guilty kind of nervous, one hand in the cookie jar. Nervous, but looking nervous wasn't against the law. And the other cop returned to the cruiser. He pulled up a report that summarized Richard Davis's driving record. Technology failed the police's second time that night, and the cursory report didn't include anything about Davis's criminal history, which would have revealed that he

was a convicted felon. In fact, he was recently paroled after an eight year prison sentence for kidnapping, but with their limited nineteen ninety three technology, all of that went uncovered. The police found no dirt on Richard Davis. Beyond the dirt that covered his hair and clothes, which he claimed was a result of trying to freeze car from the ditch. After a tow truck dragged Davis's car back to the road,

the police escorted him to the highway. He killed time in the fast lane for twenty minutes before he circled back to retrieve his stolen treasure. Davis parked properly this time, and he ducked back into the woods to find poll Class. He dodged branches and knotted tree roots by the light of the moon and found Polly where he left her a few hours earlier. He slung her over his shoulder. He untensed his muscles and released the nervous energy that

had been racking his body since the police arrived. But Pedaluma's panic was only just beginning. There was a long standing rule when it came to child kidnappings, the chances of finding an abducted child alive or at all shrank significantly after the first forty eight hours. The Pedaluma Police Department had to act quickly, Polly's life could depend on it, and the FBI joined the case. Overnight, bloodhounds, helicopters, detectives rang up scores of ex cons. They interviewed sex offenders

in surrounding counties, alibis checked out. Every volunteer and investigator came back empty handed except for one thing. The perpetrator left behind, a PONWM print pressed into Polly's bed frame. The FBI's database didn't include POWM prints in nineteen ninety three. This was unmapped territory, but it was literally all they had, and the clock kept ticking. The case spread like a California wildfire. Banners decorated the haunted town. Write down Petaluma Boulevard,

Let Polly go. The signs cried scribbled and sloppy handwriting of school children. Polly's image covered public buildings. Her face cried out from flyers scattered across parks, library, shopping malls. Her story never left The News and Information hotline was a regular fixture on TV screens, and viewers were implored to call. Over the course of the case. That hotline received more than twelve thousand calls. That's twelve thousand leads, all dead ends. The hotline rang again late in the night,

about ten days after Polly disappeared. A volunteer picked up the receiver soft sobs echoed on the other end of the line. The caller was moved to tears. She claimed she once lived only two neighborhoods away from Polly's house, and that they even went to the same junior high school. She just saw the news as she was calling from the lobby of a Los Angeles hotel, and the volunteer asked for her name, Winona. She didn't have to say her last name. The volunteer could tell who it was

from her voice alone. The sulky, unaffected teen and Beetleshue, the love interest of Johnny Depp and Edward sciss her Hands, and in real life, for that matter, the girl who literally killed her classmate on screen as part of a cool series of fixed suicides in the dark comedy Heathers. But this call wasn't an act. Win Ona Writer's sorrows spoke volumes, her tears practically trickled through the phone. Winoa

couldn't believe such a tragedy had struck Petaluma. Polly's parents couldn't believe someone as notable as Winona a rider wanted to pitch in, and there was perhaps no greater force that could pull Polly back to them. Paullie was a one own a super fan. One of her greatest wishes was to meet her in person. Then again, most tweens, teens, and fully grown adults felt the same. In nineteen ninety three, Winona Rider was the nineties. She was cool as shit.

Her head's toe black ensembles were of gothlight legend. Her eyes brooded with attitude. Her smile could slice your heart open. She was on par with the other brilliant movie beauties of the day, sure, Julia Roberts, Zuma Thurman, Nicole Kidman. But Winona was different. She was weird, wicked, wonderful, all wrapped into one peculiar package. She was named after her town in Minnesota, For fuck's sake, no one was quite like her. Winona's assistance with the poly class Case wavered

between low key and high profile. She could answer the information hotline and join in person searches just the same as any ordinary volunteer, Yet her celebrity status meant everyone listened when she spoke. Tabloids, fans, film critics. Winona witnessed the world's unquenchable thirst for a look into her private life. Then she yielded it to her advantage. If Wanona accepted interviews,

she automatically drew more national attention to Polly's disappearance. Certain news outlets had no interest in reports about Polly without their precious q And as for Winona. First, Winona forced America to pay attention to the case. Then she put a price on it. Winona Writer offered two hundred thousand dollars to any person who could safely return Polly to her parents. Weeks dragged on months, Paully's parents published a letter to the kidnapper in the San Francisco Chronicle, imploring

the stranger to bring their girl home. They left a note for Polly too, our darling, if you can read this, please know that your mommy and daddy love you so much and we will continue to search for you until we can hold you safely in her loving arms again. Every time Winona returned home from volunteering, she peeled the optimistic smile from her face. She would lay in bed and let the insomnia knock around all the bad thoughts in her brain again. The hope never left Winona, but

it waned her childhood fear of kidnapping. Not at it. Winona almost died when she was twelve years old too, and this could have been her. Anything can happen to anybody. You could become a mega movie star, or a sink like a stone to a watery grave at the bottom of the ocean, or vanish from your bedroom, never to be seen again. Winona rolled over and turned her back on the fear, but it waded behind her and alongside her in bed, just like it had ten years ago.

We'll be right back after this. We're were were. The police did find Polyclass, but they didn't find her alive. A cool breeze whipped across an abandoned mill yard and overlooked iyesore in Cloverdale, California, right off Highway one oh one, thirty miles from Petaluma. Richard Davis trudged through the empty field, dry grass crunched under his boots. The police followed close behind him. He was taking them directly to Polly. This time,

Davis wasn't hiding anymore. He couldn't. The secrets he stashed in the woods were out in the open now. Davis was sloppier than he realized on that night two months ago. The police made a panic on the night of the kidnapping and his heart pounded, the sound drowned out his careful calculations, his attention to detail slipped away. Kidnapping tools slipped out of his grasp, and left a trail of

evidence in the forest. A piece of silk fashioned into a hood, strips of packing tape perfect for binding of girls, Tights tied into a knot, complete with a tangle of human hair. A resident of Santa Rosa uncovered the clues when laggers cleared a portion of the woods on her

property in December of nineteen ninety three. She was familiar with the class case by now most of California was after hearing about Paully's disappearance for weeks on end, and now it was her turn to dial the information hotline. But there was something else. The jarring discovery in the woods jogged the woman's memory. There was a man stranded on her property not too long ago, sweaty, panic stricken, roughly two months prior, read around the same time Polly

went missing. When the police came to retrieve the items from the woods, she reminded them about the trespasser. They summoned the Santa Rosa Police records for good measure. On October first, police called the tow truck for a man named Richard Davis, and they knew that much to be true. But back at the station, there was more information about this man than just a flimsy p doubt of his driving record. Davis was an ex con. His criminal record

never seem to end. Burglary, assault with the deadly weapon, assault with intent to rate auto theft, kidnapping, kidnapping. Richard Davis did eight years in prison for kidnapping. He was paroled in June of nineteen ninety three after serving only half of a sixteen year sentence. Three months before Polly went missing. On October first, police had their prime suspect in the kidnapping of Polyclass right there, standing in front of them, and then they escorted him to his escape rope.

Investigators poured over his criminal record. Police even wrangled Davis a second time later in October, arrested for drunk driving. Davis then violated his parole by failing to appear in court. A warrant was out for his arrest. Bingo police had their inn they weren't letting Richard Davis slip away. A third time, they found him cruising around town in a van not far from where he was staying on the Coyote Valley Indian Reservation, about seventy five miles north of Petaluma.

Police booked him on violation of his probation, cuffed him, tossed him in the clink, and then they took his pomp print. It was an exact match for the print found on Polly's bed frame. Investigators shared a knowing glance. The search for Polly's kidnapper was over. Davis knew it was over, too. He cracked after a few days. I screwed up big time, he told the police. And now Davis was retracing his steps, with the police by his side.

He paused at a collection of weathered lumber mushrooms spread it from the heat, and he thrust his shin towards the rotting pile. Investigators overturned the pile board by board, and they found Polly resting underneath, haphazardly tucked into a shallow grave. Polly's family had prayed their search would end soon. They just didn't imagine it ending like this. Shattered the class family, now one member too small. It shattered Winona

Ryder too. Her heart shriveled up and shrank. It reverted back to being twelve years old, beating at a ragged pace like she was a preteen, tortured by the undertow, once again barely clinging to life. Maybe Polly once felt the same when she was tied up in Davis's sedan. Winona would never know, she would never get the chance to facilitate Polly's happy ending. Winona struggled through the premiere of her new film, Reality Bites in February nineteen ninety four.

The irony of the title sunk its teeth into Wanona's soul. She successfully convinced Universal Pictures to make the Los Angeles debut of the movie a benefit for the Poly Class Foundation, but her work still felt unfinished, woefully inadequate. Paully's greatest wish had been to meet Winona in real life, and that couldn't happen now. So Winona did the next best thing. She reached for Polly through fiction. Winona accepted the role of Joe marsh and a new movie adaptation of Little Women.

It was Polly's favorite book. Winowa brought the story to life and dedicated her performance to Polly's memory. The role was a breath of fresh air for Wanona. For once, she wasn't the weirdo, she wasn't bewitchy. She was the strong female lead, determined and dependable, just like she had been for Polly's family for two months. Winona used Little Women to shoot away the darkness crowding her life, the same shadows that housed her fears and lingered by her

side when she couldn't get any shut eye. Life didn't have to be a big dark room all the time. Maybe through her performance in Little Women, directors and casting agents would see that too, And if they didn't, win Onwa had to escape on her own before that big dark room caved in on her completely, she would have added it all up. As she could think clearly. Winona Rider's hands made quick work on the floor of a

Beverly Hills fitting room. A Mark Jacob's cashmere sweater seven hundred and sixty dollars, a niece Saint Laurent Blause, another

seven hundred and fifty four handbags. Those were at least two grand, a handful of expensive hair bows and bands worth about six hundred dollars, and six pairs of socks just for good measure, and those were eighty Bucks it with the snip of each security tag were known a snucker contraband into a Sacks Fifth Avenue shopping bag, the same bag from earlier that afternoon, her first shopping spret he already gave her credit card a three thousand dollars workout,

but a fall when is planned. The second round's going to be on the house. Wanona crinkled a handful of tissue paper in the bag to cover the sound of her sniffs. When space ran out in the Sacks bag, she stuffed the stolen clothes in a bag she brought from home. A shopping assistant knocked on the door. Went own a froze in her position, bent over on her hands and knees, scissors in one hand and a pair of Cashmere Donnic Karen socks in the other. The clerk

asked that the A list client needed anything. A coke went on, I said, a coke from the Sacks Fifth Avity cafeteria. Apparently shoplifting made her thirsty. The assistant's designer heels clicked on the tile floor towards the cafeteria. Fuck. She used that distraction once already didn't she Winona rubbed her forehead now or was she right? The bags filled, The bags blend in, then bust out of there went own A loaded the bags onto her arms. She walked

towards the exit with confident strides. Her gate spoke for her. Why, yes, of course, I already bought all this. I'm a celebrity, Why would I shoplift? Security didn't buy her charade. Instead, they wanted to know when she planned on buying the designer goods visibly stashed in her arm full of bags. First, she played dumb insisted her assistant had already paid for

the clothes. Then she switched stories and claimed the employees were keeping track of her massive haul and would just add the items to her first bill as if designed her department stores let you keep an open tab like a bar. And by the time the police arrived, Winnowna confessed to the crime, using a uniquely Hollywood excuse. She explained that a director instructed her to shoplift as research for her upcoming role in a movie called Shopgirl or

was it called White Jazz. Winnowna's web of incoherent tales impressed no one. She left the Beverly Hills department store in handcuffs on December twelfth two thousand and one. They wanted strange and unusual. She would show them strange and unusual. It was a new century, now a new millennium even, but pop culture still wanted the Winona of the nineties, a dark haired goth girlfriend to tantalize them. In Tim Burton films, a cute, cuckoo like girl interrupted her most

recent smash hit from nineteen ninety nine. Winona's heart thudded with fear as she ducked into the back of a cruiser. Yet a snicker spread across her lips. She could be a felon now she was still the outcast, still the weirdo typical. One year later, Winona Rider was not snickering. She was sweating. Her dark eyes darted across the courtroom from one stone faced lawyer to another. She understood about half this legal jargon they were spouting off, but she

knew two things to be true. One, she was already guilty. She was a felon. It was right there in the shoplifting charges, felony, grant theft. There would be repercussions. Two. One of those repercussions could be jail time. Apparently, her lawyer is one hund real defense that Winona was too fashionable to shoplift didn't carry any weight. In a Beverly Hills courtroom, Winona uncrossed her legs for the seventh time

that day. Fidgeting didn't speed the sentencing up. This was one story she couldn't flip to the end of the script and spoil the ending. She had to sit through a bunch of men in suits bickering over her character, not a character, her character, not just another dark haired beauty throwing smoldering glances across haunted mansions at movie sets. The people gathered in that courtroom had to see Winona.

For Winona, her actions, not her acting, would determine her future, which may or may not involve trading her pile of stolen design her booty for an orange jumpsuit. Winona's defense brought forward her extensive involvement in the Polyclass kidnapping as the clearest example of her sterling character. Sure, she had donated a fat stack of cash to the poly Class Foundation, but she rolled up her sleeves alongside other regular volunteers too.

It was a tender, eagleless gesture that Winona repeated for weeks. Maybe her help hadn't brought Polly back, but her murderer, Richard Allen Davis, was on death row, and that was the second best case scenario, and the prosecution refused to soften. Instead, they snapped, what's offensive to me is to trot out the body of a dead child, the opposing lawyer retorted. Winona sprang out from the bench, her eyes welled with tears.

Her lawyer objected before she could defend her involvement, and before she could explain why that case still rattled her to this day. How seeing her worst fear, the fear of being kidnapped, come to life and a little girl not unlike herself, shattered her heart. Maybe no one really knew Winona at all. She plopped back into her seat

with a sigh. Winona sighed again when the judge announced her penance four hundred and eighty hours of community service and nearly ten thousand dollars in fines and restitution, no prison sentence. The judge emphasized that if her sticky fingers ever stole again, she'd undoubtedly be pouting behind bars next time. The happy ending to her trial also created a happy ending for Weanona's witting streak at the box office. For most actresses, an acting hiatus would be devastating. For Winona,

it was a relief. She actually called her arrests the best thing that could have happened in court that day, December sixth, two thousand and two. Winona was thirty one. She started acting in films when she was barely sixteen, and she never stopped. Winona Rider performed at more than twenty movies in the span of fifteen years. A break

was long overdue. After her sentencing, she veered away from her strict regiment of back to back leading roles, took a step away from movie sets, and set new boundaries for herself, ones that would keep acting burnout at bay. She broke her newfound bliss sporadically for her special roles, a hilarious turn as commandment breaking puppet loving Kelly Lafonda and David Wayne's in two thousand and seven JJ Abrams

Star Trek reboot. In two thousand and nine, Tim Burton's clamation creation Franken Weeny Darren Aronovsky's Nora Our thriller Black Swan, which involved Wanona repeatedly plunging a steel nail file into her cheeks but another script came across her desk years later that contained the real comeback gold. Something happened to Wanona when she took that break, something inevitable. She aged

by the twenty tens, she was in her forties. Casting agents couldn't picture her as a twenty something love interest in movies anymore. That's when Netflix called. They gave her a shot at a roll that would be more age appropriate.

A mother, your average suburban mom in the early eighties, totally normal, a little nervous, perhaps, but with the stranger danger panic at the time, what parent wasn't They needed her to portray a woman who would be tested, a woman who could portray gut wrenching fear and grief in her eyes without uttering a word. A woman whose son would vanish without a trace. It's an uncanny coincidence, but stranger things have happened, and that is anything but a disgrace.

I'm Jake Brennan in this this disgrace LAMB.

me here through Disgraceland. Apple podcast listeners, make sure you have auto downloads turned on, and guys, this week's question of the Week, which actress, most Embodies gen X for you and why is it Winona, Drew, Cameron, Penelope let me know six one seven nine six six six three eight with your answers via voicemail, text and add disgracelamd pod on the socials and I'll answer you back in the next after party bonus episode in your podcast feed.

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