Thanks to the spectacular box office success she experienced with her first leading role in When Harry Met Sally in 1989, Meg Ryan became the queen of the romantic comedy during the 1990s and at the same time a symbol of the American woman. That beautiful photo of the blonde girl who has everything was completed with her relationship with another great star of those days, Dennis Quaid, with whom she was happily married and between films she shared the upbringing of her little son Jack her.

Hollywood knew how to take very good advantage of that perfect image, and who was baptized by the press as “America’s sweetheart” enjoyed hits such as Something to Remember in 1993, When a Man Loves a Woman in 1994 or You Have an E -mail in 1998, all of which helped him accumulate a fortune that today is estimated at around 80 million euros.

The romance with the public was broken at the end of the decade, when an affair with Russell Crowe in the filming of Proof of Life and her daring scenes in In Flesh, by Jane Campion, showed her in a different way, which no longer had the same support from the audience. Although in 2008 she shone again in The Women by Diane English, a year later she had her last leading role in the independent film Trapped by Love. It was then that she completely disappeared from the map.

In 2015 she returned with her directorial debut, Ithaca, an independent period film in which she booked a supporting role and had the luxury of reuniting in a scene with Tom Hanks, who agreed to visit the set as a favor from a friend. . She also worked there for her son Jack, then a rising actor, long before scoring the great goal that was her participation in The Boys. With a cost of 5 million euros, the film passed unnoticed on American screens and in Spain it could only be seen on DVD.

In an interview she gave to the Golden Globes website, Meg Ryan tried to explain her disappearance from the screens: “It wasn’t a plan. Sometimes when you work so much, it’s nice to do other things. Discover your life in a different way. The one I have away from Hollywood is very interesting and vibrant and, for me, that is what is truly important. “I didn’t have a master plan to get away from acting, it was just something that happened.” However, she really enjoyed the experience of directing, and so she has been trying to get a new project off the ground ever since.

Delia Ephron, Nora’s sister, director of her two greatest hits with Tom Hanks, wrote a script for her titled The Book, a drama that she could not advance, and also developed a romantic comedy for Netflix, A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out. (Ladies’ Guide to Selling to the System), based on the novel by Sally Franson, which still sleeps the sleep of the righteous. “Now I know that each of my films was like a miracle. Getting financing and actors is a very long and complicated process. Directing made me acquire a new respect not only for the films in which I participated, but for any that manage to come to fruition,” she commented in that interview.

But those who insist achieve what they set out to do, and that’s how Meg finally had the pleasure of directing again. At the beginning of November, What Happens Later will hit theaters in the United States, another independent film but with an ambitious exhibition plan with which the distributor Bleecker Street intends to take advantage of the nostalgia trend that it has recovered. to many forgotten icons. It’s the new film, Ryan is once again the protagonist, no less than sharing each scene with another legend, David Duchovny. In the story, two ex-lovers who are already over 60 years old meet again at an airport by chance. But when a storm cancels their flights and forces them to wait together, the connection that brought them together is reborn.

Ryan revealed in an interview with Carol Burnett for Interview magazine that he had only ever crossed paths with Duchovny two decades ago and that he simply sent him the script because he thought he was the ideal actor for the role. In the interview, who will turn 62 in the month of the premiere explained that during the pandemic the producers sent him an early version of the script written by playwright Steven Dietz, based on his own play, and then together with Dietz and Kirk Lynn he developed in long Zoom sessions the version that ended up being filmed at night in a museum in Arkansas with a modest total budget of 3 million dollars.