The star who passed up Pretty Woman, Ghost, and The Silence of the Lambs to make The Doors, Joe Versus the Volcano and Prelude to a Kiss is back in business in a big way, with two new eagerly anticipated films, Sleepless in Seattle and Flesh and Bone. And a good thing, too, for here she reveals, "I'd be insane if I wasn't an actress."
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In one of her two new films, Flesh and Bone, Meg Ryan makes her entrance by popping out of a wedding cake. Naturally she's wearing something heavenly and looks like an angel--but then the angel totters, spills over the rim of the cake, and barfs on the groom. Perfect. A winged creature with a yen for Jack Daniel's. Meg Ryan likes this kind of role, because it's writ large with paradox, and so is she. Spend two hours with her, and afterwards you'll still be wondering whether to label her urban or rural, rooted or footloose, self-possessed or vulnerable, modest or piquant. In fact, she's all of these, and the ratios are constantly changing. One thing is clear: she's a hardy Hollywood survivor who has bounced back from a few questionable career moves that followed the hit that made her a name, When Harry Met Sally....
When I meet her at a gleaming, high-tech coffee emporium in Santa Monica, she's wearing small, round sunglasses, a full-length black coat which affords no evidence of the lithe dancer's body underneath, and big, bad cowboy boots that look like they add several pounds to her weight. If she's trying to be incognito, she's succeeding, because none of the yuppies swilling their morning brews look at her twice. It's not this, but the fact that the place is so crowded there's no place to sit and talk that causes us to get into her Jeep, and cruise east on Montana.
"This is a great street for shopping," says Ryan, who goes on to confide that her New Year's resolution was to think more about what she wears. Why? "I used to beat myself up because I wasn't a good celebrity. Other people, like Madonna, Demi Moore and Roseanne Barr are great celebrities. They know what to wear to a premiere and how to present themselves. They're aware of the absurdity of celebrity and they play with it. I can't do that, but I admire it. I am going to concentrate, though, on not being my usual raggedy-assed self. I got advice from my sister-in-law, who's a great shopper. She said, 'Stick with black and you can't go wrong.'"
When I mention that no one in the coffee shop seemed to recognize her, she gives me a wry look which clearly suggests it was only a matter of time. "Usually, wherever I go, strangers wave and yell, 'Hi, Meg!'" she says with a laugh. "Once, in Oregon, a cop stopped me for speeding, but then he recognized me, tore up the ticket, and started chatting like he'd known me for years.
"And older women stop me in the supermarkets all the time, to tell me the most intimate details of their lives. People, after seeing me on-screen, feel they know me and can talk to me."
"Do you mind that?" I ask.
"No. What I minded was when people only talked to Dennis," she says, as we stop for a red light. I remember that, in the early days of her relationship with Dennis Quaid, who is now her husband, he was the bigger star. "Being with Dennis, then, was hard," Ryan recalls. "People used to stick their hand right past my face to shake his hand, and boy, nobody likes feeling that invisible. People can be mean. You need to have a strong sense of your place in one another's lives."
"It can't be easy," I say, "when one of you is enjoying more luck, more fame, than the other."
"Well, we have a theory about fame and success," reveals Ryan. "It comes in waves. Look at Diane Keaton, for example. She was so famous as Annie Hall, then that crested. Then she had a comeback in Baby Boom, then that crested. Now she's directing. How the world perceives you and who makes more money is all so silly, because no matter what, the waves come and go. In our case, both of us are used to it. It's easy to be in a marriage with someone who does what you do if you respect him a great deal, and Dennis is an amazing actor."
"So you don't think the problems attendant to fame will ever present problems for the two of you?" She shakes her head as she pulls the Jeep back into traffic. "Acting is what I do. It's not what I solely define myself as. It's not something to die for. I like my job, but I love my son."
She and Quaid's first child, Jack, was born in April, 1992.
"How were those first few months of motherhood?" I ask.
"I never thought I'd live through them," she says.
"Did Dennis get up with you in the middle of the night?"
"He'd always say to wake him," she says with a chortle, "but when the time came, I'd nudge him, and there'd be no response. His heart was in the right place, though."
"When you were sitting there with your infant son, surrounded by the quietness of the wee hours, what thoughts would go through your head?"
"I'd think about how, when I was younger, I used to wonder if I was living life the way I should be," Ryan says. "I used to worry that I was off on the wrong tangent, that the road I should be on was over there. But that kind of fear is diminishing now. I look at myself, at my life, my marriage, our child, and I say--with some disbelief--'You're doing okay.' Before, I used to take on lost causes, whether it was a tough script or a house that was impossible, and I tried to make them into something tenable. I'm realizing now that I don't have to make it that hard on myself--I can buy a house that already has a master bedroom, you know?"
"You and Dennis met on the set of Innerspace in 1987..."
"... and we started dating after the shoot."
"When did you get married?"
"In early 1991. We were staying at the Hotel Bel-Air, and we called down to the concierge and told him we wanted to get married. He sent up a reverend who happened to be at the hotel for a Rotary Club meeting."
"Not a helluva lot of fanfare," I say.
"No," she agrees. "None."
"Was your family upset they weren't invited?"
"That's the only way I could have done it," says Ryan with a shrug. All she'll say about her family is: "My parents were teachers, and they got divorced when I was in my teens." Time to try another topic.
"Do you and Dennis solicit one another's opinions on scripts?" I ask, while she looks for a place to park.
"If I'm sent a script that reeks of commercialism and everyone else in my life is saying, 'This movie is going to be huge,' but I don't like it, that's when I go to Dennis and say, 'Am I crazy to turn this down?' But when there's no project under consideration, I'd much rather discuss things like painting the baseboards in our house in Montana."
"What about when you and Dennis are on a shoot together? Don't you analyze scenes the night before?"
"Well, on Flesh and Bone we didn't, because Jack got in the way. We'd go back to the motel and have to take care of him, so we never really talked about the characters. Except for the baby, it was just like working with any other actor. And, to be honest, I don't usually like to know the people I'm working with that well, because I don't like them to know what I'm giving away."
We enter a quiet coffee shop, where Ryan orders a sticky bun that she's obviously had before, because she's able to describe it in all its nutty detail. When we get back to the business at hand, I confess that I'm hoping she'll be frank about the problems she's had with certain scripts, and equally open about Hollywood in general, because I've heard that she's famous around town for walking away from projects written with her in mind. She sighs, but doesn't veer from the topic.
"I've been in the business for years," she says, "and I'm still befuddled by the ways of Hollywood. Sometimes a studio will send me a script and say, 'Would you like to produce this with us?' Or they'll say, 'Would you like to develop this as an actress and be attached that way?' Or they'll say, 'Would you like not to be attached but have first dibs if the script turns out well?' Or they'll say, 'We want to "sneak" you a script that we're not showing to actresses yet,' but you know that with their very next phone call, they'll be sneaking it to someone else. I like to understand the logical progression of things, but this business is just too convoluted." I know that Ryan has a production company at Fox, but she tells me, "I have no clout as a producer." If that's true, why did they give her the perks that go along with paying overhead and expenses on a company? "Just so they could have a relationship with me as an actress," she says. I ask what would be a better, or even an ideal, setup for Ryan. She laughs at the notion, but says, "If they would just send me the script, and if I like it, and if I like the director, then I'm in. If not, no thanks. I don't want to be halfway attached."
Finding the right directors has not been easy, says Ryan. "The problem is, most of the good directors have production companies developing projects for them, and they're usually booked up two years in advance. Unless the script is extraordinary you can't get Demme or Scorsese."
But to return to the original question, what happened on the movies she left? On The Butcher's Wife, Ryan was originally cast in the role Demi Moore played. "I used to come in with reams of notes," she recalls. "There was a year-and-a-half of script discussions, and I'd talk, and people would go, 'Uh-huh. Uh-huh,' and never would a single word be changed. I finally realized that the people I was working with weren't taking me seriously, so I bowed out.
"The exact same thing happened on HouseSitter," she says of the film on which Goldie Hawn replaced her. "A script is really just a blueprint. After reading it, and committing to it, you have to find out what kind of movie the director wants to make. I didn't agree with Frank Oz on the tone or the point of view in HouseSitter. That's not to say I'm right, just that I don't agree."
Has such willfulness lead to fewer offers? She shakes her head, then says, "My fear is not that I won't be offered material, but that it won't be interesting material. Ideally, I'd like to work with people who are so much better than me that I come out humbled, but knowing more."
While she won't say on the record that she was offered Pretty Woman, or Ghost, or The Silence of the Lambs--though I've heard she was--she will admit that she was given early versions of the scripts and turned them all down. "The early draft of Pretty Woman that I read didn't work on the page, and after I read Ghost, I thought, 'What can an actor do with this role? Not an awful lot.'" Demi Moore clearly thought otherwise, but if Ryan really wants to work with Jonathan Demme, why did she pass on The Silence of the Lambs? "The script of The Silence of the Lambs was great," she allows, "but the milieu scared me. It was such a dark world."
I ask if she has any regrets, since all three pictures were smash hits. "Pretty Woman turned out so well," she agrees, "but it was because of Julia, not because of the script. She elevated it. But listen, I have to look at things the way they read. We all do. There's no school that teaches you how to read scripts. You have to learn by making mistakes."
"Tell me about the movies you did choose to appear in."
"I had a blast making Joe Versus the Volcano," she says, "but the third act just didn't play as well as it should." Neither did the first two, in the opinion of most people I know. What about The Doors?
"I've never seen The Doors," she admits, which puts her in with a fairly large crowd. "Making that film was disappointing. When you work in an Oliver Stone movie, you're there to serve his vision. But I wasn't sure what his vision was. My character was supposed to have been developed, there was supposed to have been a rewrite," she says with a sigh, "but there wasn't."
"Then I did Prelude to a Kiss with Alec Baldwin."
"I've got to ask you a tough question about Prelude," I say. She sits back and gives me a look that says, "Give me your best shot."
"Was there any talk on the set that a movie about the transmigration of souls might be a tough sell? Because it's not the most cinematic concept..." She laughs and says yes, there was "some concern" about the supernatural elements of the story, but they all felt that, at its heart, it was still "a relationship movie." Whatever it was, it didn't find an audience. She shrugs, as if to say, "What are you going to do?"
Following these career disappointments, Ryan has recently gone back to working with one of the people who helped put her on the Hollywood map, Nora Ephron, the screenwriter of the 1989 hit When Harry Met Sally .... Ephron cowrote and directed Sleepless In Seattle, a romantic comedy with Tom Hanks that toys with the grand themes of destiny and passion and poses the question, should an engaged woman in Baltimore pursue a widowed insomniac in Seattle whom she hears on a radio call-in show?
"I liked being around Nora," comments Ryan. "She's so smart and so quippy and such an astute observer." This was only the second time Ryan has worked with a woman director. "I was always interpreting myself for a man. Instead of just saying a line, I had to figure out how to say it to a man. I didn't realize I was doing that, of course, until I didn't have to do it anymore. With Nora, I shared a kind of woman's shorthand."
Ephron, of course, wrote that scene in When Harry Met Sally... that made everyone remember Ryan. All it said in the script, Ryan tells me, was, "Sally fakes an orgasm." During rehearsals, Ryan relates that she started to take the scene further, and then further. "All the New York extras in the deli were muttering, 'What the fuck is she doing over there?'
"After you do a scene like that," says Ryan, "it seems very risky, and you think, 'Oh, my God, what did I just do?"' She adds that as she left the set after completing the scene, the crew presented her with a two-foot-long salami wrapped in pink tissue paper.
Reflecting back on that scene--and on acting in general--Ryan says, "This thing that goes on between two actors in a scene is, in the beginning, a private thing. It's a reflection of what's in your soul. And then it's put on film, and then it's sold, and then it's criticized." She shakes her head and says, "It's such a strange marriage between business and art."
It's hard to believe that Ryan's been plying her trade for 12 years. She says she almost gave up her career just a few years ago, in the mid-'80s. "I didn't have much direction in my life, and I really wasn't sure if I wanted to continue in the movie business. I was thinking of going back to school. Then I met an acting teacher named Peggy Feury. She was inspirational," says Ryan. "She made me feel there was something intellectual about the process of acting, that it was not solely emotional. She showed me that there was a choreography to it, that it wasn't just a dance. Peggy made me want to continue as an actress."
Since she has demonstrated a deft touch with comedy and melodrama, I ask Ryan what genre she prefers. "Comedy is so hard," she says. "Setting something up, paying it off, making people laugh. It has to be so precise, and you're trying so hard to make it look easy and frothy. After the comedy that was needed for Sleepless In Seattle, for example, I needed a break. I wanted a different challenge."
Which brings us to Flesh and Bone, the success of which will depend on the screen chemistry between hubby and wife Quaid and Ryan. Though they've been paired in Innerspace and D.O.A., this is far different than anything they've done to date. Interest in the film around Hollywood is high, because writer/director Steve Kloves is the man who brought us The Fabulous Baker Boys. Ryan is quick to point out, however, that his new film is no Baker Boys. "It's not a comedy," she says. "It's an intense familial drama, very dark, very Greek, about two fuck-ups who find each other.
"Kloves had sent the script to Dennis, and after he read it, Dennis said that I should take a look. We'd been searching for something to do together." The nature of the material was such, says Ryan, that she knew the shoot would take an emotional toll. "In the end, though, I realized that if I didn't do it, didn't try a dark story like this, if I didn't grab the opportunity to give that part of myself away, then I'd have to live with it, and that would be more stressful. I know I'd be insane if I wasn't an actress," she says. "Because a lot of stuff comes in, and I process it, and then I have a venue to get it all out again."
On the set, Kloves and Ryan didn't always see eye to eye. "There's always one scene in a movie that seems to me like it doesn't belong," Ryan explains. "It's something that seems contradictory, not part of the character arc. I kept reading this one scene in Steve's script, and I said, 'She wouldn't say this at this point in the story.' Dennis's character was going to leave her, and Steve had me picking up his hat and saying, 'You don't want to be leaving without this.' I said to Steve, 'Why is she being so nice?' Steve said, 'It's an important line. It shows she's grown.' I said, 'I don't get it,' and then Steve said that the message the line was supposed to send was, 'Okay pal, if you're gonna leave, COME OVER HERE and TAKE this hat out of my hand!' In other words, the line said one thing--'Bye, no hard feelings'--but the behavior was, 'Fuck you, pal!'" In the heat of what Ryan now calls a "good discussion," Kloves told her, "I'm not going to give this line up." Ryan now says, "He was so right, of course. I love the scene. It's usually this kind of exchange, the one that doesn't seem right, that often becomes the key to understanding the character."
Now Ryan is set to make Significant Other with Andy Garcia, another dark drama that was once planned for Debra Winger and Tom Hanks. She seems confident. "It's easier to be an actor the older I get," she says. "I have experience with things, my work is better informed. When I played Sally [in When Harry Met Sally... ], she was five years older than I was. I didn't know what a baby bell was. I had to pretend, but all of a sudden, I'm a woman who's not an adolescent anymore."
"Do your family responsibilities conflict with your career at all?" I ask.
"Not at all. Last year I refinished a house, had a baby, and did two movies. And I'm not tired. I like the fact that, finally, I have a home where I want to stay for a long time. And I like that Jack has a routine, which I never had, and now that I have one--because of him--I realize that I thrive on it."
"Mmm. Two films, refinished a house, Jack ... how much more thriving can you do?"
"At my company we're going to develop projects that I won't necessarily act in," she says. "And I'm looking for projects that I might direct."
She may not be an adolescent anymore, but there is still something about Meg Ryan, in person, that suggests summer nights and denim cutoffs. I tell her that, frankly, I have a hard time imagining her in a power suit and heels.
"When I wear high heels I have a great vocabulary," she says with a laugh, "and I speak in paragraphs."
"Really? How often do you wear high heels?"
"Not often enough. I should wear them more. So I'd be more eloquent."
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Jeffrey Lantos interviewed Joel Schumacher for the April Movieline.