What really derailed Meg Ryan’s career?
There was a time when Meg Ryan was the ultimate ‘It Girl’, becoming the face of 1980s and ‘90s rom-coms with some incredible cult classics. From her signature style and witty one-liners, the actor cemented herself within the romantic lexicon through timeless love stories that seem to restore our faith in romance and renew our collective optimism in being swept away by grand gestures.
Whether it be her portrayal of an endearing control freak and the infamous cheesecake scene in When Harry Met Sally, or her repeated collaborations with Nora Ephron and Tom Hanks on You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle, the actor is a staple part of the romance genre as a whole, and the cinematic world of love and heartbreak would be permanently empty without her presence.
However, while there is no way of understating her importance within this genre, Ryan’s career took a slight nosedive after the colossal success of her early rom-coms, with her later projects not making nearly the same splash. But what happened?
While she is best known for her lovelorn characters, the actor has not worked exclusively within this genre and also starred in high-stakes action thrillers, dramas and biopics like Top Gun, The Door and Courage Under Fire, working with the likes of Matt Damon, Denzel Washington and Val Kilmer. But these projects all seemed to occur towards the beginning of her career, with many of them happening at the height of her success.
This kind of success and star power is sustainable for some, especially for men in Hollywood who don’t have to worry about the damaging ageist rhetoric that repeatedly harms women in the public eye. One that leads to them being shoved off-screen as soon as they hit thirty, being told that their career has a shelf-life and that they will quickly become obsolete. However, it seems as though the star power Ryan held in the ‘90s was not sustainable, with the actor trying to branch out into different areas of cinema and quickly being met with intense scrutiny and feedback that reaffirmed these limiting ideas.
After finding global fame through the rom-com genre, like many women, Ryan was typecast and found herself stuck in one area of the cinema world. However, she desperately tried to escape, branching out and working with renowned director Jane Campion in 2003, known for award-winning films like The Piano and The Power of the Dog.
In The Cut takes a very different tone to Ryan’s more commercial/mainstream films, following an English teacher who begins a risky sexual relationship with a New York police detective after a series of gruesome murders in the city. It is an incredibly claustrophobic film, capturing the intricacies of the power dynamic between men and women with a bleak ending that captures the inevitable trap of trying to find sexual empowerment as a woman.
While it is a fascinating piece of work, with a particularly nuanced and devastating performance from Ryan in the lead role, the film was not met kindly by critics, with the actor being treated especially harshly for trying something different and exploring a controversial subject matter.
After this point, Ryan’s career continued to plummet, being given fewer opportunities in the limelight and starring in projects that tried to capitalise on her previous success in the rom-com genre. There is no denying that she is a natural-born entertainer with spades of star power, but ultimately, it seems as though her career was derailed by limited mainstream ideas about the roles reserved for women and the pressure to remain within the trope of “what works”. And her bold performance in In The Cut was simply too ahead of its time.
