Meg Ryan names the most memorable role of her career: “I love dramatic pieces”
Meg Ryan has played a surgeon, a stripper, several school teachers, a motorcycle-riding photographer, and a Princeton mathematician, but you probably know her best simply as a love interest in a string of wildly successful romantic comedies. In the 1990s, she cornered the market on the genre, proving that, at least in that decade, Hollywood could get rich by highlighting fictional career women who fall for genuinely decent guys.
It was a short-lived heyday, kicking off with When Harry Met Sally in 1989 and ending with Kate & Leopold in 2001, but even before it unceremoniously went into decline, Ryan was seeking variety in her career. A lot of actors learn the hard way that audiences want them to stay in their narrow lane of typecasting, and Ryan is the textbook example.
After nearly a decade of watching her play loveably neurotic, witty love interests who get their happily-ever-afters, cinemagoers were not ready to accept her in darker roles. When she branched out into gritty thrillers like 2000’s Proof of Life and 2003’s In the Cut, she faced a wave of backlash that tanked her ‘It Girl’ status and sent her career into a decades-long hibernation.
While those two films toppled Ryan from her place at the top of the Hollywood ladder, she had been able to explore less edgy dramatic fare before without compromising her status. For example, in 1996, a year after playing a history teacher who goes on a whirlwind tour of Europe and falls for a charming conman in French Kiss and two years before playing a bookstore owner who falls for a professional rival in You’ve Got Mail, she played a helicopter pilot in Courage Under Fire.
Directed by Ed Zwick, the film stars Denzel Washington as an army officer struggling to put his past behind him while investigating whether a medevac helicopter pilot (Ryan) should be posthumously awarded the Medal of Honour. As he looks into the case, he finds that there are conflicting accounts of her last mission.
It was both a critical and commercial success, with reviews praising the suspense of the central mystery and its emotional weight. Washington received the bulk of the plaudits for acting, but it wasn’t lost on anyone that Ryan had demonstrated how easily she could adapt her skills to drama. In a 2008 interview, she revealed that it was one of her most memorable roles. “I love dramatic pieces like Courage Under Fire,” she said. “That was really fun with all those guys, guns, and helicopters.”
Considering the success of the film, Ryan’s career decline in the early 2000s seems more like an unfortunate fluke than an inevitability. Courage Under Fire proved that audiences were receptive to a bit of variation in her filmography. It’s easy to imagine a world in which she continued to take on crowd-pleasing dramas and action movies before branching out into more risky fare. Instead, she took several gambles that, through no fault of her own, turned out to be disastrous for her career.
