The 2001 movie Meg Ryan never wanted to make: “I did say that I couldn’t do another one”
By the early 2000s, Meg Ryan had already spent a decade as America’s Sweetheart.
Throughout the ’90s, she was as bankable and popular a leading lady as Julia Roberts, headlining massive hits like Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, When a Man Loves a Woman, French Kiss, and City of Angels, making it seem like she could do no wrong. However, when she was offered a particular film in 2001, she was hesitant to commit—even telling the director she’d had her fill of a certain kind of role.
In truth, Ryan was at a career crossroads in the early 2000s. She began experimenting with making different kinds of movies that played with or outright fought against her image as a romantic, charming, frothy leading lady. There was the action thriller Proof of Life, which teamed her with Gladiator’s Russell Crowe, and In the Cut, a serial killer thriller that featured a notoriously graphic sex scene that prompted a vicious reaction from the press. However, sandwiched between those two movies was a more typical Ryan effort: Kate & Leopold, a rom-com co-starring Hugh Jackman.
Admittedly, Kate & Leopold – a time-travel tale that saw Ryan’s character fall in love with her ex-boyfriend’s 19th-century ancestor – was slightly different than most romcoms. It had that trippy plot setup, for one thing, but it was also directed by James Mangold, who had previously made the crime thriller Cop Land and the harrowing drama Girl, Interrupted.
To Mangold’s frustration, though, when he pitched the movie to Ryan, she didn’t want to hear about it. She’d made so many romcoms in the ’90s that she became synonymous with the genre, and while these movies were her most memorable hits, she’d started to feel constrained by them. Movies like Proof of Life and In the Cut, even though they weren’t overly successful, at least showcased an actor trying to prove to people that she had range.
“At first I did say that I couldn’t do another one,” Ryan told the BBC, “But the director, James Mangold, sold the film to me. He said this one was different. It wasn’t quite a romantic comedy; it was more of an urban fairy tale. He really persuaded me to do it, and he proved to be a really great actor’s director. They’re very hard to come by.”
Mangold’s description also spoke to a broader shift taking place in Ryan’s career. Rather than rejecting romantic stories outright, she seemed to be searching for projects that gave her something unfamiliar to explore within them. Kate & Leopold wasn’t simply another tale of two attractive people falling in love—it wrapped that familiar emotional core in fantasy, historical displacement and a fish-out-of-water narrative that distinguished it from the contemporary romances audiences had come to expect from her.
That balancing act ultimately reflected the dilemma facing many stars who become synonymous with a particular genre. The very films that establish an actor’s reputation can gradually become the hardest ones to keep making, as audiences expect more of the same while performers crave new creative challenges. Ryan’s hesitation was therefore less a rejection of romantic comedies than an attempt to rediscover what had made them exciting in the first place.
Ultimately, Kate & Leopold didn’t join the ranks of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle at the top of the Ryan romcom mountain. It received mildly positive writeups from critics and did decent business at the box office, but it didn’t revitalise Ryan’s love for a genre she’d already had too much of. It would be her last classic romcom for more than 20 years, too, although part of that lengthy gap is because she took an eight-year break from Hollywood between 2015 and 2023.
When Ryan returned with the rom-com What Happens Later, it was clear that she’d realised she had unfinished business with the genre. She wrote, directed, and starred in the film opposite David Duchovny as two exes who rekindle their old flame when a snowstorm forces them to spend the night together in an airport.
Perhaps time had softened Ryan’s outlook on the genre that made her a star because she told the Los Angeles Times, “You know, I’m a student of them too, rom-coms.” However, a little bit of that frustration must have remained when she told Variety, “I’ve done more than 30 movies, and maybe only seven of them are rom-coms.”
She noted that she tried her hand at other genres but defeatedly concluded, “It didn’t really work.”
