How cute is Meg Ryan?
As she bounces up the steps to the Carlyle Gallery - not far
from her pied-a-terre on the Upper East Side - settles into the
overstuffed red-velvet couch and promptly orders a hot chocolate,
I'm thinking, That freaky talking teddy bear in the
fabric-softener commercials has got nothing on this woman
nothing.
Perhaps the waiter is thinking the same thing. As we're about to
begin the interview, he returns to the table, bows solicitously
and reports, in formal tones usually reserved for members of the
royal family, "I make the hot chocolate with milk."
"Oh, I'm in heaven!" Ryan says brightly, blue eyes
widening and mouth clamping shut with a Muppetish expression. But
Ryan's ingenue act only goes so far, something she signals the
moment the waiter is out of earshot. She leans across the table,
eyes suddenly narrowing. "What, were they going to make some
Swiss Miss back there?" she asks. "'No Swiss Miss for
you! You get milk!'"
Either way, hot chocolate seems a particularly fitting beverage
for 37-year-old Ryan. Name another actress who even approaches
her sweetness, her cuddliness, her utter chewableness - to borrow
the actress's own word to describe her six-year-old son, Jack.
Sure, there area a few copycats out there (Sandra Bullock and
Calista Flockhart come to mind) - actresses who manage to
humanize their beauty with bits of idiosyncratic vulnerability,
who emit a certain unself-conscious sparkle, who come across as
intelligent yet charmingly self-doubting, feisty yet childlike -
but they're working from Ryan's recipe. And more important,
they're working, whereas she makes it look perfectly effortless.
The forthcoming You've Got Mail is custom-tailored to this widely
admired screen persona. A contemporary retelling of the Ernst
Lubitsch romance The Shop Around the Corner, The film stars Ryan
as Kathleen Kelly, An Upper West Side children's bookstore owner
whose relationship with a high-powered journalist (Greg Kinnear)
begins to unravel when she falls for an anonymous online pal. She
doesn't know it, but the mystery man (Tom Hanks) is her nemesis,
the owner of a new Barnes & Noble-style superstore that's
sure to put her friendly little establishment out of business.
Mail was cowritten and directed by Nora Ephron, the woman behind
the two romantic blockbusters - When Harry Met Sally
and
Sleepless in Seattle - that seared the actress's plucky Ivory
girl image into the public's consciousness. Asked if she
developed Mail with Ryan in mind, Ephron laughs and says, "I
write everything with her in mind." (She also cowrote
Hanging Up, Ryan's next project, costarring and directed by Diane
Keaton.)
While Mail has been cannily designed to cater to the expectations
of Ryan's mainstream fan base, her other holiday film,
Hurlyburly, is guaranteed to shatter them. "People want to
be surprised," Ryan explains. "They don't want to get
bored. They want to see something new." She scrunches up her
nose in that patented Meg Ryan way, waits one perfect beat and
adds, honkingly, "I hope!" The very antithesis of the
bubbly Mail, Anthony Drazan's edgy and claustrophobic adaptation
of David Rabe's bleak Broadway hit concerns a drug-abusing
Hollywood player named Eddie (Sean Penn) and his misbehaving
buddies (Kevin Spacey, Chazz Palminteri and Garry Shandling).
"This is not a story about noble people or good
behavior," Ryan acknowledges cheerily. "It's as
politically incorrect as you can probably get."
It's certainly as incorrect as Ryan's ever gotten. Born Margaret
Mary Hyra in Fairfield, Connecticut, her first film part was in
1981's Rich and Famous; a few seasons of As the World Turns
followed. But her break-through finally came with 1989's When
Harry Met Sally
, in which she played the fastidious Sally
Albright, whose coffee-shop fake orgasm was one of the most
indelible movie moments of the '80s. The fact that Ryan herself
came up with this idea suggests that even then she was looking to
subvert her good-girl image - but it wasn't long before real life
helped her along. After Ryan married actor Dennis Quaid in 1991,
her mother, Susan, and stepfather, Pat Jordan, began speaking
publicly about their acrimonious estrangement from Ryan,
initiating a media frenzy that hasn't entirely subsided. While
Ryan politely declines to discuss the relationship, the tabloid
flap suggested that the actress was a good deal more complicated
than Sally Albright. And some of her subsequent roles - an
alcoholic soccer mom in When a Man Loves a Woman and a chopper
pilot in Courage Under Fire - reflected that complexity.
But even people familiar with Ryan's edgier work may find
Hurlyburly something of a shock: Ryan's Bonnie, a wrung-out
exotic dancer who describes herself proudly as "a drug
person" and is willingly treated as a sort of sexual dish
rag by the film's coked-up wolf pack, is a remarkable stretch. In
fact, director Drazan admits he wasn't initially sure Ryan was
right for the part. "Maybe there was a question about
whether she'd be able to confront Sean with the kind of intensity
she has to have, the sense of outrage and betrayal," he
says. "But when I met with her, appreciation for the
language and the contradictions of the character totally
convinced me." Despite having practically no rehearsal,
Drazan recalls, Ryan "just jumped right in. She had a pretty
feisty partner in Sean, who's really going ten-plus on the weird
scale in their first scene. There's a very low comfort level for
an actor stepping into that - you can't just cower and feel your
way in; you've got to go, and she really went."
Asked what sort of preparation she did, Ryan says, "One day,
I just drove around to as many 7-Elevens as I could find. With
Bonnie, everything she needs, you could get from a 7-Eleven - her
whole life." I picture fans cornering Ryan over by the
Mortal Kombat machine, badgering her to sign their Super Big
Gulps, but she says she was able to observe quietly until she
found the perfect model. "I saw this girl having breakfast -
you know, she had the microwave thing going on, and she had her
kind of cosmetic situation happening, and she was buying a nail
file and some milk," Ryan says. "And this is where it's
at for her."
In addition to being a dark character study, Hurlyburly is an
indictment of the Hollywood ethos. Eddie, a casting director,
seems to be living the Tinseltown fantasy - sharp wardrobe, nice
car, stunning house with indoor pool, all the coke he can stuff
up his nose and a circle of friends to share it with - but he's
haunted by self-doubt. Ryan thinks she knows why. "If you're
in that midlevel-executive world, it's all about subjective
perception," she explains. "So you have to equivocate -
never take a stand and never burn a bridge. And I think that
people don't measure themselves well in such a gelationous
environment. The whole thing is just wiggly." This
"wiggliness" is one reason Ryan and Quaid spend most of
their free time on their ranch in Montana, far from the
self-centered ambition that flourishes in Hollywood. "You
see people at premieres, especially in L.A.," she says,
"and you just know they're thinking, Shit, I should have
been a part of that, or What am I going to say at the party?
There's even a sort of euphoria sometimes when people are seeing
a bad movie and had nothing to do with it."
It's precisely people like this, I imagine, who keep pressing
Ryan to play the cutie pie. "They'll say, 'I don't know if
she should do that,' literally coming down to the kinds of
scenes," she says incredulously. One film she's particularly
interested in making - "a very gruff, raw sort of
story" - has studio suits hemming and hawing. No doubt the
same attitude helps explain why Ryan has been unable to interest
a studio in her dream project, a film about the poet Sylvia
Plath, who took her own life in 1963. "We're probably going
to have to write the script on spec and sell it as a small
package," Ryan acknowledges.
Truth be hold, the notion of America's sweetheart playing the
doomed poet and feminist icon, who died by inhaling gas fumes
from an oven, sounds only slightly more likely than Sylvester
Stallone's still-unmade biopic about Edgar Allan Poe. But when I
suggest that the role doesn't seem like an obvious fit, Ryan
takes a deep breath and launches into one of those spirited,
now-hold-on-buster speeches she's delivered in practically every
movie she's ever been in - including Hurlyburly.
"I am totally fascinated by that woman," she begins.
"To have that kind of muse, to be that kind of poet, to have
that thing go surging through you, to have that kind of brain
chemistry, to be alive under those social strictures, to be
married to that kind of man
it's just too interesting. And
I think Sylvia Plath speaks to woman forever, but especially now,
because more than ever we are these multitasking people with a
lot to accomplish - and on top of everything else, she was a
mother. To be an artist and a mother - those are two very
difficult things to reconcile."
It's easy to see why tackling complicated characters like Plath
and Hurlyburly's Bonnie is attractive to Ryan. "A lot of the
time, I play people who are just nice - which is like having a
white wall and trying to find something vivid in it," she
says. But being nice has been very nice to Ryan indeed: It got
her voted homecoming queen and "cutest senior" by her
highschool classmates, for instance, and some two decades later,
it earned her a reported $10.5 million for her performance in
You've Got Mail (She was paid union scale for Hurlyburly). Still,
as any kid with an extra ounce of baby fat knows perfectly well,
cute cuts both ways.
The label "sort of bugs me," she admits. "I mean,
there are worse things to be called, but 'cute' feels dismissive
of somebody's
weight. And probably you got me on the one
say that I would say this, because I just did three days of a
press junket where the guys were all going, 'Well, Meg, your hair
looks really good.' And I mean I have a company and projects are
going on, I'm a mother, I'm all these things, and I'm talking
about my hair. People get this surprised look on their faces if I
talk to them about anything serious - a book I just read or my
opinions on something. They just go, read or my opinions on
something. They just go, 'My God, she can use a three-syllable
word! That's pretty impressive!'"
"People are put in boxes whoever they are," Ephron
observes, "but anyone would find it burden to be called
America's sweetheart. In Meg's case, it happens to be true. But
that doesn't mean it isn't a burden."
But Ryan claims that there are advantage to being underestimated.
"It's a cloaking device, in a certain way," she says.
"And strangely, so is fame. You're often more invisible to
people than they ever think. People have these ideas about you,
and you can hide behind that. And I have to say, I've totally
enjoyed that anonymity, because I'm very happy to be evasive. I
don't know how much I want to reveal myself to everybody. They
want to talk about my hair?" She widens her eyes and smiles
prettily, cocking her head to the side. "Fine, whatever
."
By Aaron Gell "Time out New York" December 17-31, 1998