Ryan wrestles with rom-com
As a director, actor is pushing boundaries of the genre that made her a star to examine issues of aging and regret
Meg Ryan was hurting. Not metaphorically. The actor and one-time rom-com queen was actively sore, having spent the morning, one of many, unpacking and moving herself into a home she’d long been renovating in Montecito, California.
Persevering through the painful twinge, making order out of the past — really, finding comfort in the present — are the sneaky subcurrents of Ryan’s new movie, “What Happens Later,” a wily rom-com that she co-wrote, stars in and directed. A two-hander opposite David Duchovny, it distills moviedom conventions and plays with a different emotional palette; Ryan grappling with her own cinematic brand. It is only her second foray behind the camera and the first time she has appeared on screen in seven years.
She hasn’t missed the spotlight. “I feel like
I had the ride, the Hollywood ride,” she said in a recent interview. “I kind of went to the moon already. So I don’t have giant ambitions to be back in that.”
Though she’d always done dramatic work, it was romantic comedy that brought Ryan megastar status in the ’80s and ’90s: Nora Ephron’s “Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail” and “When Harry Met Sally …” (which Ephron wrote and Rob Reiner directed) were all form-defining blockbusters, still beloved today. Returning to the genre at this point in her career is both safe and gutsy. She knows how to play the beats; how to deflect them too. But Ryan, 61, may also face intense scrutiny for her choices, her humor, her looks, her very state of being.
That, too, doesn’t seem to faze her. “It took me this long to have something to say,” she said, adding, “My interest in this movie isn’t about Hollywood’s perception of me. I’m not interested in controlling that. I don’t think I can.”
Instead she wanted a story that asked vulnerable, wounded questions: “Do you think about the one — what would happen if I ever saw him or her, after all this time? What would we say to each other? Will we forgive?” But she wanted to wrap it all in what she has called the confection of romantic comedy.
Ryan’s gamine features — blond hair enviably waved, eyes a bright lagoon blue — are gently leavened by age and, in Hollywood fashion, cosseted by wealth. Because of a hip issue, she now walks with a slight limp; rather than try to mask it, she wrote it into her “What Happens Later” character, who breezes past it with a remark about being old and doesn’t let it stop her from dancing.
In the film, now in theaters, Bill and
Willa are opposites-attract paramours who split up in their 20s and have their meetcute when they bump into each other at a regional airport in their 50s. They get snowed in. Banter ensues. No one and nothing else enters the picture, except time, personal history and the disembodied voice of the airport announcer, whose messages get increasingly pointed.
Those touches gave it a magical realist twist that was all Ryan, Duchovny said.
Especially since they shot almost entirely overnight, in an off-duty airport or at the
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, the whole production felt mystical. “She doesn’t make anything look difficult, and that doesn’t mean it isn’t,” Duchovny said in a phone interview.
“As much as we hated physically working nights, there was a mood that descended that was good for creating. Real life faded away.”
That was intentional. “We worked the entire time as if the script was a dream,” said Ryan’s friend Kim Gillingham, an acting and dream coach who was on set every day as a sounding board for the two performers.
Another friend, Sally Franson, a novelist, also went over ideas with Ryan early on. “She was thinking about, where can the rom-com go in 2023?” Franson said. “If you enchant” the audience, “you lead them into a period of high immersion.”
The project — based on a play by Steven Dietz, “Shooting Star,” originally adapted with Kirk Lynn — came to Ryan during the pause of the pandemic, when she grew interested in the setup of two people “under glass,” as she put it, “who stop, and you see what happens.” Her character is New Age-y; Duchovny’s is stolid.
“I just think David’s so funny as an anxious person,” she said, “just how thoroughly bothered he was by everything.” They got to know each other as they workshopped the material over six months of video calls. “I had never done that much work on a script before,” Duchovny said. “It was great. She kept tinkering with it.”
The film is dedicated to Ephron, who died in 2012 and whose imprimatur is in the dialogue and pacing along with, Ryan said, her sense of kismet.
Ryan grew up in Connecticut, one of four siblings with a math teacher father and a homemaker mother. Her parents split when she was a teenager, and her mother — who became a theater teacher — helped get her into commercials. By the time Ryan was 21, she had landed the soap “As the World Turns.” A small role in the original “Top Gun” (1986) got her noticed; three years later, “When Harry Met Sally …” made her a part of cinema history.
Ryan has a son, 31-year-old actor Jack Quaid, with her former husband, Dennis Quaid (they divorced in 2001). In 2006, she adopted her daughter, Daisy, now a college student. Parenting was one reason she stepped back from performing.
Another was that — having been on sets or in the Los Angeles celebrity bubble for years — she felt underdeveloped as a person. Not that she didn’t appreciate some aspects of fame. “There’s an openheartedness toward me,” she said. But she also felt as if she were “roped off.” She moved to New York, seeking a less filtered experience: “You can’t get a cab. You’re standing there in the rain.” (After a decade or so, she and Daisy returned to California, to be closer to Jack, in 2020.)
Unlike most actors of her generation, Ryan had been guided by female filmmakers, including Jane Campion. She had long wanted to write and had shown Ephron her first screenplay. Ephron responded with some positives and also some critiques. But Ryan had been studying, taking Robert McKee’s screenwriting workshop, “becoming a detective of how stories work,” Franson said.
“Ithaca,” her 2016 directorial debut, was a World War II coming-of-age drama, adapted from a William Saroyan novel, which Ryan saw as a story about how communities once helped boys grow into men. (She and her son co-starred in it.)
The long break between directing projects wasn’t exactly intentional, she said. “I was trying to get things set up, but they weren’t happening.” The fraught economics of Hollywood now are such that even Meg Ryan had to scramble to get a Meg Ryan movie made: “What Happens Later” had a budget of about $3 million, and a lot of called-in favors. They didn’t have the money for test screenings; the whole thing hung on Ryan’s instincts.
Forty years into her career, she has found the path to hone them. Ryan likes to go a Vedanta temple in California, by herself, and walk around in peace.
“I just want to feel my way through things,” she said.