The 1987 movie Meg Ryan bet her career on: “Could be the big commercial hit I need”
The 1980s were packed full of films that still treated technology like it was literally the most exciting thing imaginable. There was no internet, digital cameras, sat nav, or HD TV, and they genuinely thought there would be flying cars by the year 2000. It was due to that kind of thinking that you got movies like Innerspace with Meg Ryan.
Along with Back to the Future, Tron, Short Circuit and Batteries Not Included, it was a film that was basically made by geeky men who weren’t that long out of university and aimed squarely at young boys who had no idea of the complexities of women, but thought that robots were super cool. And along with that, it featured another trope Hollywood was obsessed with, namely, either making things really massive or really tiny.
In the case of 1987’s Innerspace the action on show involves a test pilot, played by Dennis Quaid, who agrees to be shrunk down to microscopic size and injected into a rabbit, only to accidentally end up in the bloodstream of a human instead, and a hypochondriac at that. Ryan played Quaid’s girlfriend in the movie, which was her first major role after a supporting appearance in Tom Cruise’s Top Gun the previous year.
She spoke to the LA Times around the film’s release, then in her mid-20s and still full of trepidation at the direction her career could take, explaining, “Nobody knows if they’re truly capable of carrying a film until they get the chance. Innerspace could be the big commercial hit I need to get recognition as a female lead.”
Although she got a husband out of the movie in Quaid, having met him on the set, she didn’t hold too much hope for it, saying, “Though Innerspace is very funny, I think the only impression people will have of me is that, for a reporter, I looked strange in a leather skirt.”
Fortunately for Ryan, her desire for the film to become a hit was exactly what happened. Thanks to some admittedly pretty dazzling, Oscar-winning special effects for the time and Steven Spielberg producing, the film was a global smash, earning almost $100million against a budget of $27m and within 18 months, Ryan had started filming the movie that would make her – the 1989 comedy When Harry Met Sally opposite Billy Crystal.
Her performance in that was a historic comic moment, and that was reflected in her Golden Globe ‘Best Actress’ nomination, something she repeated twice more in a ten-year period in the Tom Hanks movies Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. The year before that second movie, Ryan also had a massive hit with the Nicolas Cage weepy City of Angels, which was a loose remake of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, which ironically was released the very same year as Innerspace.
Although reviews of City of Angels were mixed, Ryan got some considerable acclaim for her performance, and the film brought in almost $200million worldwide. Nowadays, it’s probably best known for being the film that caused The Goo Goo Dolls to write ‘Iris’, the song that has been used on approximately every single social media video since the dawn of time.
Meanwhile, Ryan’s next big role will be in Lena Dunham’s Good Sex alongside Mark Ruffalo and Natalie Portman, the story of a couples therapist in her 40s heading back into the dating pool.
