NEED TO KNOW
Heathers star Lisanne Falk is looking back at some of the drama on set.
Falk, 60, appeared on the Nov. 4 episode of The Patrick LabyorSheaux with Patrick Labyorteaux, who also starred in the 1989 movie. Falk appeared in Heathers as Heather McNamara, while Labyorteaux played bully (and rapist) Ram Sweeney. Winona Ryder played Veronica, with Shannen Doherty as Heather Duke and the late Kim Walker as Heather Chandler. Christian Slater played the murderous J.D. and Lance Fenton played Ram’s accomplice Kurt.
During the podcast, Falk shared that she never did any screen tests or chemistry reads for her role, which she was put in at the last minute. Labyorteaux, 60, asked how her relationship was with the other cast members and also explained his own relationship with them.
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“Shannen Doherty was a pistol,” he said. “Always has been.” Doherty, who died in 2024 at the age of 53, worked on Little House on the Prairie, as did Labyorteaux, but at different times.
“My experience with Shannen is that she’s like a firebrand and you can get along with her or you cannot get along with her, but she’s very opinionated and very outspoken and can be really fun or really terrible depending on your experience with her,” he said. “I had a great time with her.”
He also praised Ryder, 54, for being a “sweetheart” and said that after the movie, when they ran into events, she would always come over and say hello.
Falk said her experiences with her castmats was “not dissimilar” from Labyorteaux’s. Ryder and Doherty still had to attend school, while she was older. “I remember the first day we had to get all the scenes and then they had to keep going off and I had to do my close-ups with basically the script supervisor,” she said. “. . . That was another learning experience of how to act when the person that was supposed to be there isn’t there.”
She called Walker, who died in 2001 at age 32, a “more serious” person than she was. “Kim was definitely see she intimidated the heck out of me,” she said, which was “perfect” for their on-screen dynamic.
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“And then Shannen, she just came in there and she was always saying stuff and she basically kind of rubbed all of us the wrong way initially,” Falk said.
“It was very well known that she really wanted the part of Veronica and she vocalized and made a lot of noise about that,” she continued. “So we just all kind of tolerated her.”
Falk said she became “really, really good friends” with Ryder. Falk lived near set, so even on days when she wasn’t needed, she would often hang out on set with Ryder and see what the film crew was doing. “That was really my film school because I learned like what everybody on every job did,” she said.
She and Ryder became so close, in act, that after filming, she accompanied Ryder to Francis Ford Coppola’s winery when the latter actress was doing screen tests for 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Coppola even had Falk audition, and she described him as “very cool,” even though she was “devastated” that she wasn’t cast.
Falk also told Labyorteaux that Heathers was her favorite project. “I peaked at 23,” she joked. “Heathers is my favorite role. My relationship with Winona that came from that and just meeting everybody and the whole experience and just the movie and the role and how it all turned out.”
In 2014, Doherty spoke to Entertainment Weekly for this oral history of the film. She said she didn’t remember wanting to play Veronica and that she “loved” her role as Heather Duke.
“I loved the fact that she started out weak in the group,” she said. “Bullimic and the dog that you kick. And then she became — their term — a ‘megabitch.’ I loved that.”
Heathers became a cult classic and has also been adapted into a stage musical, which is playing now off-Broadway.
