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