Winona Ryder, an emblem of '90s cool, grows up

Los Angeles

IN an early episode of the new Netflix supernatural drama Stranger Things, a single mother played by Winona Ryder sits in a cubbyhole communicating with her youngest son through a tangled ball of blinking Christmas lights. He has vanished under mysterious circumstances. To better understand how to sell such a strange, emotional moment, Ryder looked no further than her own mother, Cynthia Palmer.

"I don't have kids, so my mom helped me a lot on this," Ryder, 44, said while sitting on a big leather couch at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, dressed in black jeans and a faded Leonard Cohen T-shirt she bought at a concert in 1988. "I'd call her sometimes and say: 'Mom, what would you do if every indication is that your child is dead, but you believe that lights are telling you that he isn't?' And she'd say: 'Honey, I'd totally believe that. It's primal.'"