Meg Ryan Returns to Acting—Here's What She's Planning Next

Meg Ryan

Following an eight-year hiatus, Meg Ryan, the When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle star, 61, is back on the screen in the romantic comedy What Happens Later (in theaters Nov. 3), which she also directed. Based on Steven Dietz's play, Shooting Star, two ex-lovers, Bill (David Duchovny) and Willa (Ryan), get snowed in at a regional airport overnight, where they discover that they are just as attracted to and annoyed by one another as they were decades earlier. As the night progresses, they begin to wonder if their reunion is coincidence or magical.

Parade sat down with Ryan to discuss her break from acting and why she's returned.

Walter Scott: You took a break from acting. Why come back now? 

Meg Ryan: Well, really it had to do with the fact that the script came to me during COVID, during lockdown. It struck my imagination probably because of that, because those two people were stuck together.

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This is based on a stage play. What did you have to change to make it into a film? 

A couple of things. It’s a very different play. What developed was the idea that Bill and Willa had been rerouted and redirected by magical forces—that he’s a catastrophic thinker, that she’s the magical one. We developed the idea that they don’t remember things the same way and structured the mystery of what happened before. The airport became more of a dreamscape, more of an idea to fall into the notion of this luminal landscape where time seems to stop, like the magical reality really increased.

I had a lot of time with the script, so those things developed, and then David came along. It all gets more alive somehow when you write for somebody. The play was about a couple that had met in the ’70s and then reunited in the ‘90s, so this is a little bit more of a generational kind of reckoning. My generation as opposed to the playwright’s, you know?

You and David are in every scene. Is it harder to direct when you can’t be behind the camera? How do you prepare for that? 

There are only two people who talk in the whole movie, you’re right. Well, and then there’s that third entity. I had to shot-list everything with the DP [director of photography]. We put the shots all together when we got to Bentonville [Arkansas] a few months before David got there, and then I just had to be with him and do the scenes. Really there was only one little place that we couldn’t even really afford playback, so I watched everything once we got to the editing room, so it was pretty compartmentalized.

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As the director, you have your choice of leading men. What made you think that David would be your perfect foil? 

I love The X-Files and so much of his work, but I remember him guest-starring on Garry Shandling’s The Larry Sanders Show. He was so deadpan and funny in that, and his style is so unique. Of course, he’s so handsome and sharp and all these great things, but he’s got a Walter Matthau kind of delivery and I just thought it’d be so fun to give that guy [Bill] anxiety and to have him look on the bleak side of everything. I just thought he would do that so beautifully. Anyway, it’s a chance for him to do something maybe a little different than he’s done before, so all of that.

How do you see the theme of the movie? Is it about hindsight or second chances? 

I really feel like one of the conceits of the movie is the infidelity of memory—that memory is so mutable and fluid; the fact that they don’t remember things the same way, and the fact that the trajectory of each of their lives is based on a misunderstanding. I think all of us have had maybe someone who broke our hearts, and you react to them for a long time, and you try to find someone who’s not like them. You’re in reaction to something, and in this case, they were both in reaction to something that they didn’t have a consensus on.

So, more than being about hindsight being 20/20 or anything like that, I really feel like it’s more about the art and the dream of reconciliation. And I don’t mean that as if they resolve everything, I mean it in the way that it’s reconciliation of opposites. It’s this idea that these two people can embrace their differences and find a type of peace. I worry about saying the word “reconciliation” because I don’t want to give away the end of the movie or anything like that.

But I thought of them like halves of a whole. They’re dressed exactly alike; they both have these black-and-white outfits on; I kind of thought of them like a yin-yang symbol. You know that symbol that’s always in flux and always trying to find its whole. They have the same name; they’re halves of a whole and they’re trying to find a way to be whole, you know?

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They are so different—is the fact that they are opposites why the attraction is still there all these years later? 

I think they’re opposites and they’re alike in ways that keeps on shifting throughout the movie. Theirs has to be a complicated relationship to sustain an hour and a half with only the two of them. So, I think in some ways they’re opposite. The most obvious way is that he’s a catastrophic thinker and she’s a magical thinker. And they’re both pretty entrenched, they both have some arrested development, they’re not complete. They’re grown-ups but they’re not fully formed. Even the last music was “Learning to Fly,” so that’s done.

Which are you? Are you more the magical or more the realist in your life? 

Oh, I don’t know, but I think the idea that we updated the story and gave him anxiety, which is seemingly pretty modern, increasingly so many people have it, right? This younger generation, men seem to really be suffering. The guys who watch the movie really relate to that part of him.

What Happens Later was dedicated to Nora. I’m assuming Nora Ephron, since it didn’t have a last name. Why did you want to give her the nod? 

I just feel really grateful to her. I have a lot of blessings in my life from working with her. It’s a thank-you really. She’s somebody who loves this genre, and I love this genre, so it’s a Valentine really, a thank-you card for her.

You filmed this in Arkansas and those scenes where you’re shooting from outside inside; those were just exquisite. Talk a little bit about your decision to film there.

We shot in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, which is one of the most-endowed art museums in the country. It was built by Alice Walton, and Moshe Safdie is the designer. We thought we really needed a space that was beautiful and luminal and magical, not just your average airport. Because as you saw, the movie gets increasingly more surreal, so we needed to start and end in spaces that could be real and unreal at the same time.

I’d run into it because I did a film festival there a couple of times. I went down to Geena Davis’ Bentonville Film Festival. I went on a bike ride, and I saw this fantastical shape through the trees and went in there, I just couldn’t believe it. It spans the lake and this river and it’s so peaceful. It’s just a really magical space and they were so cool in letting us use it. We shot all night, so during the day they used it. They roped it off and used it as an exhibit in the art museum, which we all thought was just so great. The whole town is amazing by the way, I love it there.

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So, are you back now or do you want to continue to have long breaks between your projects? 

I really don’t know. I love this little movie, so right now, I just want to get it out there. Right now, it’s this feeling of… You know when you blow up a balloon and then you tie the end and you just sort of puff it up into the air; you give it a little tap and see where it goes? It’s kind of that feeling right now. It feels like we just finished it, so I don’t have an imagination yet for the next thing.

Your son, Jack Quaid, has followed you into acting. How proud of a mother are you when you see his achievements? 

Just couldn’t be more proud. He’s an incredibly hard worker, he’s in it for all the right reasons. He’s just heart and soul, and he’s so gifted, so I just couldn’t be prouder.

Did you have advice for him when he started or he did it pretty much on his own?

It’s all him. It’s all him.

Watch What Happens Later only in theaters starting Nov. 3. 

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