Meg Ryan Breaks Down Her Best Looks, from "When Harry Met Sally" to "You've Got Mail"

I clearly cut all my hair off

'cause everyone was sick of dealing with it.

[upbeat music]

This is When Harry Met Sally in 1989.

This was just the costume designer's idea

of like New York in the 80s.

I think my favorite

is whatever the librarian look is with the bow tie.

Fantastic.

I remember that the hair from their college days.

I'd said to Rob, There was a [laughs] time

when I used to take the curling iron

and just like put it on one side

and let it bake there for a while

and then do the same over here in Aquanet it.

I looked like that in high school.

[Interviewer] How many of those

were the wigs versus your actual hair?

[Meg] Let me tell you something.

I think they were all my hair.

The iconic deli scene? Yes, yes, yes! Oh, oh!

I didn't come up with the whole scene.

The scene was in the script,

but there are variations on how it was originally scripted

and then what we ended up with,

but no way did I come up with that line that Billy said.

It was just too funny.

I'll have what she's having.

This is Sleepless in Seattle.

It was a movie about love in the movies than love itself.

It was an homage to love in the movies.

Are you in love with him?

[soft romantic music] [typewriter keys clack]

I'm not now.

Now those were the days when people knew

how to be in love.

This, I think, was Nora Ephron's idea

of like the journalist, so this, I think, was her idea,

and I think kind of Nora

might have dressed a little bit like this, you know,

with the big shoulders and some of these colors.

There's a coat in that movie that I actually gave

to the Academy [laughs] last year.

Yeah, that I kept, but then I gave it away.

Judy Ruskin, she designed that coat,

I don't know based on what but probably some film

from the 40s that she and Nora loved.

There's a whole last part of the thing where she's going,

she's like running to the Empire State Building,

and they had like this dolly track set up and all of that,

like, you know, all kinds of apparatus set up,

and the shoes were either too tight.

No, they were too big and I couldn't.

It was like kind of flip flopping down the street.

Her hair and makeup for this,

I think they were just trying to figure out

what to do with all my hair,

and they came up with various braids.

[Interviewer] This was the second time

you worked with Tom Hanks.

What was that like for you?

This is one where we were barely ever

around each other, actually,

because he was shooting in Seattle,

and I was shooting in Baltimore,

so we had a couple of times where we

were on the same set but rarely actually.

It's you. It's me.

You've Got Mail.

I clearly cut all my hair off

'cause everyone was sick of dealing with it.

So much of this stuff is very reactive, you know?

Like I don't know that it was like super intentional.

I think I had done a movie just before this

where I had super bleached hair,

and like it was trimming that off,

and so it ended up being short like this,

and then I was stuck in this kind of cycle of short hair

for a long time, and I didn't really like wearing wigs.

I think it was so Nora's vision, you know?

I think she wanted her,

Kathleen to look kind of classic and undated.

She's got a small bookstore.

Big chains were taking over these little mom

and pop bookstores, and she was like regretting that

because I think she felt like New York was really a series

of small towns, which is true actually if you live there.

And the fact that these little places were going away, she,

you know, felt sad, felt that that was a little bit tragic,

and then I always wonder what she would've done later

with this, like after, you know,

Barnes & Noble got sort of eaten up by Amazon, right?

So interesting.

Joe Versus the Volcano, 1990,

and I played three different characters who,

according to John Shanley,

who was the director and the writer,

they were basically three different aspects of womanhood,

almost like a prepubescent, which is DeDe,

and then like a teenager self Angelica, the poet,

who is clearly trying on personalities,

and the last one is Patricia, who sort of,

of all of them, looks the most comfortable in her skin.

They all had different voices, they all had different looks,

and they were, you know, John is a union.

So a lot of the preparation on my part for that movie

was trying to understand what that even meant.

You could be in different aspects of the female archetype.

Colleen Atwood, it's just, I'm glad you chose this

because I feel like Colleen is one of these artists

with a giant imagination, and this was a chance

to have the resources at her disposal

to express herself very fully.

And, I mean, the entire movie is a really imaginative,

and it's true magical reality, and she grounds it as well.

I don't know how many Oscars she has by now

but probably deserves,

definitely deserves every one of 'em.

My favorite line in that movie is that the middle one,

like the teenage sort of adolescent one,

like Tom, I think, talks to her, and she says things like,

I have no response to that.

I have no response to that. This is French Kiss, 1995.

I had a blast doing this movie.

We shot the whole thing in France, very top drawer.

Larry Kasdan directed it.

It was, I mean, just fun on so many levels,

but I remember like a week, we had to shut down

and rewrite the end, [laughs] which was fine to do in France

because we were, I think they put the entire crew up

off season at the Hotel du Cap, which was crazy.

This is another example of not being able

to grow my hair out.

The short hair, I just loved it for this person.

This is somebody who like wasn't, she was not on the run.

She was sort of on the go.

She was like living out of her purse or something.

She had like obviously one shower,

and that's where I have this amazing Herve,

like who's that designer

who did that dress? Herve Leger.

Herve Leger, yeah,

this incredible dress that I showered for.

But I remember going to that atelier

to try it on and have all these fittings.

I'd never done that before, and it was great.

It was just really fun.

My son also was really little then,

and there's this scene where I'm covered in cake,

and he just thought that was the best thing

that ever happened to him or to me.

Just had a blast. He was there that day.

Addicted to Love. Oh, I'm still stuck with the short hair.

So I guess I [laughs] was like working a lot right then.

I love this look for this.

Like this is a nut of a character.

She's like a [laughs] vigilante or something. [laughs]

She's a photographer,

and she's like obsessed with her ex-boyfriend,

and Griffin Dunne directed this,

and I loved every single thing I wore in this film.

It was just so fun, and she was just an exaggerated,

like downtown kind of Soho character,

like after hours kind of character.

I think that Renee just had pure freedom and like,

'cause that's downtown, that's New York.

You know, wear what you want and figure it out,

and I wore a boa.

Who does that?

So I love that, and then she has this like striped tank top

and then like a more velvet coat.

Oh, I do remember I got this coat, this like,

it wasn't leather.

It was a vinyl, short, tight, not quite a motorcycle jacket

but kind of with fake fur, and I wore that every day

for like five years after [laughs] this movie.

[Interviewer] You do a more smokey eye look.

This is like an edgier look than we've ever really seen.

Yeah, Lutz Wesemann did that, and he,

again, he was new to film, and he was from fashion.

So it was fun to have Sally and Lutz on that movie.

To shoot in New York is the greatest,

and then to shoot downtown with Griffin, it was all fun.

It never seemed like work, this particular film.

Proof of Life.

This character, I think,

was spending all this time in South America,

and so the costume designer, Ruth Myers,

who I really liked and admired, she's amazing.

She just kept finding pieces that we

could kind of justify this character's kind of assuming some

of the environment that she's around, that she's been in.

You know, she started out as a sort of country club lady,

kind of like conservative person,

but she's like now living most of her life in South America.

So that's why these sarongs and t-shirts

and kind of things that look like she

could've found them in a thrift store.

We shot it like 12,000 feet,

so it was something to have to acclimate to that.

There's very little oxygen up there,

so once you're there for a while, you're okay.

You know, you're after about like a week,

but you take your time 'cause it strains the body,

and you don't come and go.

You basically stay up there. [laughs]

The hair and the makeup, again,

I think it was just supposed to look like undone,

you know, not trying too hard, which,

of course, takes a ton of work.

What Happens. Oh, we're already at a 2023.

I took a big break, grew my hair,

and have one outfit in What Happens Later,

and this idea came to me that both, you know,

there's only two characters in the film,

and only two people talk in the film,

and they're ex lovers who see each other 25 years later,

and, of all the people in the airport,

they're basically dressed alike.

They have the same name.

She's like Willa Davis and he's William Davis.

Hello Willamina. Hello, William.

I imagine them as sort of the two halves of a hole,

like a yin yang, kind of like a black and white symbol

that's always trying to find, which they never do,

find some sort of balance and equanimity.

And what I love, too, is that, as they go through the movie,

like he sheds his black jacket,

she sheds her long black coat,

and they just look like more and more innocent

and almost like they're in their pajamas by the end.

That was very deliberate on our part

to have it be a transition like that.

I haven't really directed.

I mean, I was in a movie that I had a small part

in a movie I directed before this, and this was,

I realized that we were really lucky because it

was just a teeny movie, a $3 million movie,

which means that we didn't have a lot of the bells

and whistles that you have on other films.

Like we didn't get to watch playback, so only footage I saw

was by the time we got to the editing room.

So I'm happy about that because I think

that the performances are really unselfconscious,

and we were really free,

and we shot all night long for like 21 days,

and just felt like being in a little bit of a bubble,

and it works for the intimacy of the romance, I think.

[Interviewer] And what made you decide on David Duchovny?

[soft pleasant upbeat music]

It has rom-com elements that I love,

but it's a love story,

and I think what I ended up loving the most about it

is that it isn't what you think,

that it has some deeper pings,

makes some pretty modern-day observations

about love and forgiveness,

and it somehow is a love story rom-com with,

it's like a delivery system for some more profound ideas

that hopefully don't feel like medicine going down. [laughs]

[Interviewer] How was it walking down Memory Lane?

I have to say it's a new experience. It's strange to see.

I do, I have a lot of hair to account for.

Thank you. That's a wrap on Meg Ryan.

Thanks, you guys. Thank you for listening to all of this.