Meg Ryan on love, aging and returning to rom-coms: 'It doesn't stop in your 20s'

At 61, Meg Ryan is directing and starring in a new rom-com.

She seems as baffled as we are that she is no longer in her 30s, eternally a version of her quirky and adorable characters in seminal Nora Ephron movies such as “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.” 

Ryan laughs a bit, as if she hasn’t ever considered how old she is, that rather time just passes, and you look up wondering how you wound up where you did. It’s not an I-wish-my-life-turned-out-different way, but a did-all-that-time-really-go-by type of way. 

Yet here she is with “What Happens Later” (in theaters Friday), an impossibly charming movie about a former couple who run into each other 25 years later in their 50s. A storm strands Willa (Ryan) and William (David Duchovny) in an airport and they compare the dreams they once shared and then lost.

At 61, Meg Ryan is in a new rom-com:That shouldn’t be such a rare thing.

It’s not their ages that drew her to the story, she tells USA TODAY.  The movie is adapted from the Steven Dietz play "Shooting Star," and Ryan helped write the script with Kirk Lynn.

“(Love) is endlessly interesting to me,” she says. “People are trying to sort it out. We’re looking at people and asking quite often, ‘How are you doing it?’ That never stops. It doesn’t stop in your 20s.”

It’s been eight years since we have seen Ryan in a film, and 14 since she did her last rom-com. 

And then like magic, she reappears to play the archetypal version of her most beloved characters.

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When the trailer for “What Happens Later” was released in August, women – particularly those over 50 − cheered. It was a moment. 

The two-and-a-half minute trailer sent a message: We see you. You exist. Yes, you – the one being served Instagram ads full of menopause gummies, chic readers and compression socks – you are important. You, too, are allowed to fall in love, to be attractive, sexy, to have feelings – maybe even for Duchovny. 

Television and movies, which largely ignore women in their 50s and older, have discovered that this market segment is alive, which has brought us “The Golden Bachelor” and rom-coms with other '90s leading actors such as “Ticket to Paradise” with Julia Roberts and “The Lost City” with Sandra Bullock. 

But what we really needed was our patron saint Meg – who we’ve grown up and aged with − to feel connected to and hopeful. To find love.

And to talk to about aging, but not in a physical sense. (“That’s not very interesting,” Ryan said in an interview in 2015.) But what it means for characters, and for those watching. The importance of making a movie about a couple in their 50s, who carry disappointment and regret with equal weight as wisdom and confidence.

She smiles and scrunches her nose as if she is thinking in that way you’ve seen her do a dozen times on the big screen: “Well, I’m that age and more.”

We almost forget we’re not sitting on a couch across from her, but instead she is coming via video from a room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. She looks rom-com movie ready with her wavy blond hair, dressed in an oversize blazer and white button-up after a photo shoot to promote the movie with Duchovny, 63. (Despite the actors’ strike, she and Duchovny are allowed to talk about the movie, which has an interim agreement with the Screen Actors Guild.) 

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They banter in the interview, sometimes adding to the other's thoughts, the same way they do in the movie. 

“(Love) makes the world go round forever, always. It's the best thing we've got. So why not dig into that?” Ryan says. “It's not exclusive to people at any moment in their lives. And it probably is an underserved audience − I don’t think there are very many movies about characters in their 50s finding love.”

Ryan worked on the movie after calling off her engagement to John Mellencamp in 2019. She was married to Dennis Quaid from 1991 to 2001.

“How do your views of love and life change in that time? In some ways radically and in some ways not at all," she says. "I didn't have that perspective at all when I was 20, so I needed this all this time to have gone by to notice that there's naivete and innocence involved as well. Maybe you learn that you don't want to be in that again, or maybe you don’t learn at all, maybe just go right for it again.”

Just over a third of films released last year included a speaking female character in her 30s, according to an analysis released earlier this year by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. 

But that number sharply decreased as women got into their 40s (16%), 50s (8%) and 60s (7%).

By comparison, the numbers were nearly double for male characters in their 40s (29%) and 50s (15%), while 9% of films featured men over 60.

The movie poses questions that are almost impossible to ponder until you have lived long enough to make decisions you question: Have you ever wondered, “What if?” “If we could see our memories in advance, would we do anything different?” and “Are you happy?”

The movie characters talk about Willa’s limp, which she blames on “old people-ness,” and how now that they are older and have things to say, no one wants to listen. They revisit old arguments, like how they both believe things ended.

"It really wasn't what you said, about wanting different things. You left. You let go," Ryan's character says. "When people break up there's the thing that people tell each other and there's the truth, which you never told me."

As they learn who each other is now, the past arguments seem less important, and they fade into a moment where they find themselves dancing to the pop beat of “Pure” by Lightning Seeds. It is much more Belinda Carlisle than club, and anyone who went to college in the late '80s and early '90s likely heard them, danced to them, and then promptly forgot. 

Ryan talks about how music transports you, and how she hopes the movie does the same: “With certain people in your life, you meet them. And then you're right back to where you were … like stops time in a way like these. They're time traveling together.”

Just like we’ve time traveled with Ryan over all these years.