When I was in high school, Winona Ryder was my favorite actress. I loved her in Little Women, The Crucible, and other movies. She played the kind of roles I wanted to play (or in the case of The Crucible, the kind of roles I wished I was brave enough to play). And then she went and got crazy for a while.
I kind of unintentionally have been watching a lot of her lately, though. I binged-watched Stranger Things a couple weeks ago, and, because I'm reading a book on the Salem Witch Trials, I re-watched The Crucible this week. And what I kind of latched onto with both of those pieces is that she plays a character who, admittedly, is kind of crazy. But each of them is a crazy that makes sense.
In Stranger Things, she plays a mother who loves her child so truly and unhesitatingly that she (twice!) turns her home into a House of Crazy on the off chance it MIGHT help her son.
In The Crucible, it's a case where either the clingy ex-girlfriend/woman scorned thing has become so strong as to push her over the edge, or that she has gotten so caught up in her own lies that she starts believing them.
We believe Joyce when she is CONVINCED that Will is talking to her through Christmas lights, because what we have seen makes sense; we follow her logic and agree with her. When Abbigail shrieks at an invisible yellow shapeshifter in the rafters and then climbs over the pews to get away from it, it makes sense because we have been following her journey and know exactly what she's up to. Her actions may not be rational in that we, the audience, know that she's faking - but we understand that she is faking because she has too much invested in the lie to let it go. And that makes sense to us.
It's strange looking at these two performances by a very gifted actress, and then watching her make bizarre faces at an award show that just confuse us. And that's the difference between fiction and reality. The fiction has to make sense. If a character in a novel, play, TV show, etc. acts bizarrely, we have to understand why, and a good author will show us. Reality doesn't have that constraint; that's why we have the term "stranger than fiction."