For self-proclaimed outsider Winona Ryder, it’s simple: She’s an old soul who wants to live a quiet life—and keep the drama on the screen. In the news since the late 1980s when she burst onto the scene in Lucas, Beetlejuice and Heathers, today the 47-year-old is a proud homebody who steers clear of social media and prefers reading classic books to going out. She even shuns Kindles and iPads and reads the real thing. “I’m convinced that [technology] is going to make everybody go blind,” she says with a laugh.

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Maybe her attitude is a throwback to a childhood growing up without a TV. In any case, it can’t help but grease the wheels for her TV role as Joyce Byers on a hit show that itself is a throwback to earlier times.

Related: Winona Ryder on Her Mom Role in Stranger Things, Netflix‘s Love Letter to the ’80s

The sci-fi horror series Stranger Things, which debuted on Netflix in 2016 (and returns for season three on July 4), is set in the early 1980s and full of nostalgic pop-culture homages to films like E.T. and The Goonies. Ryder’s Joyce, the struggling single mother of two whose young son, Will (played by Noah Schnapp), vanished in season one, is not the perfect put-together mom. She took inspiration from her own mother for the role as well as from actresses who played single moms, like Marsha Mason in The Goodbye Girl and Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, whose characters “were very flawed, and I loved that,” says Ryder. “Had Joyce been, like, a perfect mom, I would not have been attracted to the role,” she says. That seems par for the course in her career, as Ryder has always tended to lean left of center and away from the standard, perhaps thanks to her unconventional childhood and her own eclectic tastes.

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A Beatnik Baby

Ryder was born in Winona, Minnesota (The town became her namesake.) “Do you know what a shoelace baby is?” she eagerly asks, before going into the history of children who weren’t born near hospitals and required boiled shoelaces—to tie off umbilical cords. “I basically came a little early, and it was on a farm in Winona, and my dad went into a complete panic, and all he knew was to sterilize a shoelace!” When she was 6 months old, they moved to San Francisco, and she also lived in South America for a year. “But I can never get the real story from my parents.”

Those parents are mom Cynthia Palmer and dad Michael Horowitz—who, she says, “are still madly in love, it’s kind of crazy”—along with a younger brother and two half-siblings. Her parents weren’t hippies, she says. “They were much more—I would say—beatnik, even though beatnik is sort of the precursor to the hippies.” And they associated with the literary set, including 1960s writers Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Timothy Leary, who was Ryder’s godfather. Thanks to her mother’s former job as a projectionist at the University of Minnesota, they’d hang a sheet up in a barn on the property, set up a projector and “have these amazing screenings,” she recalls. “I remember watching To Kill a Mockingbird. That was when I really fell in love with movies.”

When she was around 7, her family moved onto an expanse of land in Northern California owned by a friend of her father, with six other families. And while she knows the word “commune” might evoke cult-like images, she swears her home wasn’t like that. “The place we lived was, like, 380 acres of redwoods. It was beautiful.”

She attended a regular school during those years, but “I definitely had a difficult time—like, socially,” she says. She was a great student academically, but “I was an outsider.” Raised without television, she spent much of her time reading and playing outdoors, putting on little shows with the other kids and inventing adventures—she remembers imagining the sap from the redwood trees as jewels that set her and her playmates on treasure hunts.

She moved to Petaluma, California, when she was around 11 and began acting soon after—though her strict parents required she maintain a 4.0 grade-point average and only work in the summer. She was naturally drawn to roles that reflected the fringe characters to which she could most relate, and by 13 she had been cast in her first film (playing “the homely girl,” she says), opposite Corey Haim and Charlie Sheen in the movie Lucas (1986).

Soon enough, she was spinning her outsider feelings into movie gold. She was a breakout star in the dark-comedy cult-classic Heathers (1988), about a teen who destroys (literally!) the snobby high-school clique that’s ruining her reputation. She really hit her stride in her work with quirky director Tim Burton, whom she’ll never forget meeting on a studio lot in Culver City. While waiting 45 minutes for her appointment, she passed the time talking to a man she didn’t know. She eventually asked, “Where is this Tim Burton guy?” The stranger said, “Oh, that’s me.” Ever since, Ryder says, “I’ve always felt like I’ve had a weird telepathy with him,” which helps explain their successful collaborations in Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Frankenweenie (2012).

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In 1991, Ryder began working with another of her recurring collaborators, Keanu Reeves, while filming Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). “He’s just one of my favorite people,” she says warmly. “He’s always, like, been there for me, and that’s kind of rare. He’s one of my favorite people. We have this deep bond.” She and Reeves also appreciate the same things. When a friend recently commented that Ryder was a homebody who only wanted to stay in and watch movies, Ryder knew the label wasn’t completely true. “I was thinking, like, I’ve gone over to Keanu’s and watched movies!” she says laughing.

Related: Keanu Reeves Talks John Wick, Bill & Ted and His First True Love

Getting Serious

In the 1990s, Ryder starred in one of the defining movies of her generation, Reality Bites (1994). She also earned Academy Award nominations for her roles in The Age of Innocence and Little Women. And she executive produced a project that truly spoke to her: Girl, Interrupted, about a woman institutionalized after having a nervous breakdown. At the time, she shared her personal struggles with anxiety and depression in the hopes of lessening the stigma of mental health issues. “I talked consciously and deliberately about it, and then I got sort of…” she trails off, dispirited. “I’ve never been diagnosed with anything,” she clarifies. But she laments that her candidness was misinterpreted as “‘I’m crazy,’ when I was actually trying to do the opposite!”

She praises the “spectacular mentors” she’s met over the years, from veteran actors like Jason Robards and Jane Alexander, whom she worked with at age 14 in the romantic drama Square Dance (1987), to Anne Bancroft, Maya Angelou, Burstyn and Alfre Woodard, who all taught her long-lasting lessons while filming How to Make An American Quilt (1995)—“one of the best times of my life.”

Perhaps that’s why Ryder is so protective of the teenagers—like Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown and Gaten Matarazzo—she now works with on Stranger Things. “I’m the mom, but I’m not really the mom,” she says. “It’s not my place to be like, ‘No, you don’t have to go on Instagram!’” She laughs, but she does worry. The best advice she has for them harkens back to her own childhood: that kids should have a home to go back to that isn’t in the business.

(Netflix)

Much like Ryder still does, wherever “home” may be. For now, it’s at a friend’s apartment in New York City, where she’s staying while filming the HBO miniseries adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by trans-Atlantic pilot Charles Lindbergh. But she has maintained a home in San Francisco, so she’s currently “sort of bicoastal,” she says. “I’m actually always trying to ask that question to myself, like, ‘Where do I live?’”

Wherever she is, her favorite thing to do is stay in and watch old movies or read. “I find great joy and solace in reading. It’s something that I can’t imagine my life without,” she says, as she lists her favorite authors, all classics: Saul Bellow, Primo Levi, William Styron, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf. And she also just discovered binge-watching, which she worries might be “quite dangerous” having plunged into multiples episodes of the Netflix documentary series Wormwood, with her dad, as well as Wild Wild Country and The Innocent Man.

It’s weird, she says of binging, “because you start, and then suddenly, it’s like a day and a half later! I don’t think I’m built for it, because I can’t stop. Like, I can’t stop.” True to form, the show she’s obsessed with now is an old one: the TV series Damages, starring Glenn Close and Rose Byrne as hard-charging lawyers, which aired from 2007 to 2012.

Also on her watch list is the third season of Stranger Things. “My storyline is different from other characters, so I’m really, really curious about what’s going to happen,” she says. In a way, Ryder’s life reflects what her character Joyce is going through—seeking some balance among the Upside Down things she feels are happening in the real world. “I want [Joyce] to find some peace—you know, maybe get away from the Shadow Monster,” she says with a laugh. “Maybe find the right side up.”

(Netflix)

But unlike the steady, simple at-home life Ryder aims to live, when it comes to her characters and her work, “wherever the drama is, I’m sure that’s where I’ll be.”

Related: Winona Ryder Confesses: I Recite My Lines from Heathers