40-year old actress Meg Ryan (T&A), Jennifer Jason Leigh & Nicole Spruill in In the Cut (2003) [1]
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Ryan was 41 at the time of the film’s release and the nudity to her was “no big deal”. She said she faced other challenges, like playing a character who didn’t talk much.
The critical reaction to the film was negative and focused on Ryan’s performance and nudity. The actress acknowledged the film marked a fatal point in her career as a beloved Hollywood star.
“In the Cut felt like a real turning point,” she said but maintained she liked doing the movie.
“I know that when I did In the Cut, the reaction was vicious,” she said.
“I think the feeling with Hollywood was mutual. I felt done when they felt done, probably.”
Ryan also said she was a “terrible celebrity” who found the media cycle of baring personal details to promote movies unbearable. She said she wouldn’t be able to find fame in the current landscape.
“If I started my career today, I wouldn’t have a chance,” she told Vanity Fair. “Social media has changed things. It’s so vast and big. I couldn’t handle the constant attention and judging.”

Mega.Co.Nz

Meg Ryan bares all, makes leading man nervous

Reporters in Toronto can’t seem to stop talking about Meg Ryan’s steamy sex scenes in ”In the Cut,” which had its world premiere Tuesday at the Toronto Film Festival. At a press conference, they kept asking her about the skin shots, despite her repeated contention that they weren’t that big a deal. ”There are some things in the movie that were much more difficult than the sex scenes,” said the romantic comedy queen, ”like playing a character who doesn’t talk much, which is something new for me.”

In the movie, directed by Jane Campion (who famously coaxed daring nude scenes from Harvey Keitel and Holly Hunter in ”The Piano”), 41-year-old Ryan plays a professor drawn into an affair with a kinky homicide detective (”You Can Count on Me”’s Mark Ruffalo) who may himself be guilty of the brutal serial killings he’s investigating. Talking to reporters, Ryan insisted that ”In the Cut” wasn’t a huge departure for her, even though she’s best known for her America’s sweetheart roles in movies like ”When Harry Met Sally” and ”You’ve Got Mail.” She said: ”I’ve done 30 movies and I’ve done seven romantic comedies. So I don’t know what the typical Meg Ryan movie is.” Besides, she’s done nudity before in a handful of movies, including ”The Doors” and ”Flesh and Bone.”

Still, she proved bolder than the oft-nude Nicole Kidman, who was initially offered the part but who said she found it too emotionally wrenching in the wake of her divorce. (Kidman did produce the movie, though.) Jennifer Jason Leigh, who plays Ryan’s sister, said that, for Ryan’s fans, ”it’s a shock for [Ryan] to do this. But she does it like nobody’s business. She’s jaw-droppingly good.” Leigh added: ”I think it was actually kind of easy for her [to do the sex scenes]. It just wasn’t asked of her before.”

It was not so easy for Ruffalo, who suffered from some performance anxiety. He said Campion ”wanted the character to be such a competent and confident lover that she kept shouting things like, ‘You’re not at school anymore. You know what you’re doing.’ It was very stressful.”

Meg Ryan has addressed the role that single-handedly ended her career as romantic comedy queen

Meg Ryan was one of the greatest leading ladies of the ’90s.

Quirky and beautiful and beguilingly funny, Ryan was the undisputed romantic comedy queen for more than 10 years from the late ’80s through to the beginning of the 2000s.

But Ryan seemed to disappear from movie screens in an instant and in a recent interview with New York Times Magazine, the former America’s sweetheart said a single role as a schoolteacher in a racy R-rated film was enough to end her career.

She said shocking audiences, who were used to her good-girl archetype, with her In The Cut character marked the end of her career as an actress.

But despite being happy with her life out of the spotlight, Ryan said she was “shocked” at the vicious reaction she endured for being “naked”. She said the more broad experience of being in the public eye made her feel “isolated” and like an “incomplete person”.

Ryan starred alongside Mark Ruffalo in In The Cut in 2003 after more than a decade of stellar hits including You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless In Seattle and When Harry Met Sally.

A racy, erotic thriller with a hypersexual plot line, In the Cut centres on Ryan’s character, a schoolteacher, having a torrid affair with a detective. The two meet after Ryan’s character sees a couple performing oral sex in a bathroom and later finds a severed arm in her front garden. The movie continues on in a similarly violent and sexual manner.

Ryan was 41 at the time of the film’s release and the nudity to her was “no big deal”. She said she faced other challenges, like playing a character who didn’t talk much.

Her co-star, Ruffalo, who played a kinky detective and her lover, told the press that during filming the director shouted at him to play a confident lover, saying: “You’re not in school anymore!”

The critical reaction to the film was negative and focused on Ryan’s performance and nudity. Entertainment Weekly’s headline was: “Meg Ryan bares all, makes leading man nervous”.

At the film’s premiere, reporters asked whether she was uncomfortable with the “skin” scenes and her departure from her role as “America’s sweetheart”.

“I’ve done 30 movies and I’ve done seven romantic comedies,” she told reporters.

“So I don’t know what the typical Meg Ryan movie is.”

But the film was poorly received by critics and reviews focused heavily on the nudity.

The Entertainment Weekly report said Ruffalo had “performance anxiety”, quoting him saying he was “really scared” and feared being compared to her previous partner Russell Crowe.

Ryan tried to defend her performance, telling critics it was not the first time she appeared nude. She said typecasting her as a “sweetheart” when she’d done so many films was hasty.

In an infamous interview, she was challenged by veteran talk show host Michael Parkinson about being naked. He suggested she was defensive about being interviewed because of a highly-publicized divorce and the poor box-office performance of the movie.

“How could you be naked?” Parkinson asked her, along with a line of questioning about why she was an actress.

“You should’ve prepared your audience for your doing something different,” Parkinson chastised. Ryan said she found his reaction shocking.

In the interview, the actress appears increasingly anxious and angry. When Parkinson asks Ryan where she thinks the interview should go next, Ryan suggests he wrap up it.

The actress acknowledged the film marked a fatal point in her career as a beloved Hollywood star.

“In the Cut felt like a real turning point,” she said but maintained she liked doing the movie.

The public had been turning on Ryan for some time since she split with her husband Dennis Quaid in 2001. Rumors circulated she cheated on him with Russell Crowe, her co-star in the movie Proof of Life.

Ryan did not address the cheating rumors at the time and speculation she was unfaithful only worsened.

She addressed the rumors in 2008, eight years after she and Quaid called off their marriage, clarifying Quaid had been unfaithful to her for a long portion of their marriage. She described the experience as being “very painful”.

“I know that when I did In the Cut, the reaction was vicious,” she said.

“I think the feeling with Hollywood was mutual. I felt done when they felt done, probably.”

Ryan hasn’t starred in a movie for over a decade — the 2008 comedy-drama The Women her last significant role. She is staunch a return to acting isn’t for her, saying the experience of being on camera stifled her ability to live her life fully.

“I have so much admiration for actors who have incredible imagination for life or have life experience that they can then bring to the audience,” she said.

“I don’t think I was one of those people. I felt like an unformed person.”

Ryan said she was a “terrible celebrity” who found the media cycle of baring personal details to promote movies unbearable. She said she wouldn’t be able to find fame in the current landscape.

“If I started my career today, I wouldn’t have a chance,” she told Vanity Fair. “Social media has changed things. It’s so vast and big. I couldn’t handle the constant attention and judging.”

Ryan didn’t grow up wanting to be a performer, saying despite having 30 or so films behind her and being one of the most recognizable faces of a decade, she is disinterested in acting and found fame exhausting and disabling.

“I felt like I was behind a window looking at my life,” she said.

“I remember thinking, I want to have my own thoughts.

“Also, it was hard to walk around anywhere. It was never about people being mean; it’s that I couldn’t move. I would sort of duck and cover, and that wasn’t what I wanted.”

She explained her team of lawyers and handlers would often leave her alarming messages telling her there was an “emergency” that would turn out to be related to business.

“I’d say to some of the people representing me at the time, ‘Guys, don’t leave me messages that say it’s an emergency. If something’s wrong with (my son), that’s an emergency. The deal didn’t close isn’t one’,” Ryan said.

Ryan studied journalism in the early ’80s at New York University and was working part-time as an actor when the film offers just kept coming. The lucrative offers to be on screen turned into such a flood of opportunity Ryan decided to drop out of college.

But Ryan was still uncomfortable with acting, celebrity and fame — she found acting “fun”, but it was more a situation she found herself navigating than a dream she chased.

“I don’t feel like, naturally, I’m a performer,” Ryan said.

She said while being young and famous had many benefits, fundamentally it “disadvantages … a part of your brain, your self, your soul”, explaining her life experience was limited by her career and success.

She said when you’re famous, you never know who is telling you the truth.

“I felt in a crazy way that, as an actor, I was burning through life experiences,” Ryan said.

“Somehow I was a helicopter pilot or a journalist or an alcoholic. I was living these express-lane lives.”

At the end of her career she felt churned out and exhausted. “I was burned out. I didn’t feel like I knew enough anymore about myself or the world to reflect it as an actor. I felt isolated,” Ryan said.

Ryan said she was now free to be happy with her partner, musician John Mellencamp, and their daughter Daisy. The family lives together in New York City where Ryan works as a film writer. She also hopes to get into directing.

She has just had the green light for a romantic comedy film she wrote and is also working on a sitcom with Saturday Night Live boss Lorne Michaels.

She said the secret of her happy relationship with Mellencamp might be about being free and older, but she retained some of her rom-com quip when she commented: “I sometimes think relationships are for aliens. Who does it? Who can do it?

“I don’t know how any of us ever do.”

Sex Scenes Didn’t Kill Meg Ryan’s Career. Being a Woman in Hollywood Did.

In a new interview with the New York Times Magazine, Meg Ryan says her career in front of the camera tapered off in the early 2000s because she was cut out for neither acting nor fame. The former left her feeling like she was “burning through life experiences” in the roles she played without having any of her own. The latter placed a barrier—“so much metal,” like the impermeable shell of a fancy car, she says—between her and the rest of the world.

Now that she’s out from under the gaze of the paparazzi, Ryan says, she’s “free to have fun” with fiancé John Mellencamp, and free to write or direct without being pigeonholed as an actress. And not just any actress—a very specific type fit for very specific roles. Known as “America’s Sweetheart” for her roles in beloved romantic comedies like Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally, she drew criticism for her star turn in 2003’s much racier In the Cut.

“The reaction was vicious,” Ryan tells David Marchese. She continued: “Since then, I’ve had publicists say to me, ‘You should’ve prepared your audience for your doing something different.’ … I’d never presented myself like that before; it was so different from my assigned archetype. Probably I had a very neutered image.”

Journalists covering the film at the time didn’t hide their—possibly feigned—shock at Ryan’s participation in In the Cut’s graphic sex scenes. She recalls British talk show host Michael Parkinson scolding her, “How could you be naked?” In a 2003 Entertainment Weekly piece titled “Meg Ryan Bares All, Makes Leading Man Nervous,” In the Cut co-star Mark Ruffalo claimed that, during filming, he was scared of underperforming because of Ryan’s romantic history with sexy men. “All I could think of is ‘what am I going to be like compared to Russell Crowe?’” Ruffalo said.

In contrast, Ryan and her co-star Jennifer Jason Leigh spent the Entertainment Weekly article downplaying the significance of those scenes. “There are some things in the movie that were much more difficult than the sex scenes, like playing a character who doesn’t talk much, which is something new for me,” Ryan said. Leigh noted that Ryan had always been able to act with the sort of eroticism she channeled in In the Cut—“It just wasn’t asked of her before.”

In the new Marchese interview, Ryan calls her In the Cut role a “real turning point” that marked the end of her stardom. (She says she and Hollywood tired of each other around the same time; she’s appeared in a handful of movies since then but is trying to turn to directing.) That self-diagnosis adds a new data point to our broadening understanding of the twisted and treacherous paths to success for women in Hollywood. Ryan says that early in her career she shied away from marketing herself as a sex symbol, and had decided to be “the funny person rather than the pretty person.” Then, when she split from husband Dennis Quaid and starred in a film that called for explicit sexuality, her audience felt betrayed.

Ryan’s sweet, fresh-faced persona was a fickle sort of cultural currency, a cachet that could be undone by a single unexpected role. But the opposite route would have been no easier: Actresses who start off in sex symbol mode (see: Megan Fox) have found it difficult to be accepted as anything else. Ryan now says the “America’s Sweetheart” nickname didn’t allow for “the full expression of a person.” “But,” she says in the new interview, “that’s what movie stardom is. There’s a blankness required.” And that’s how a brilliant comedic actress decides she’d rather take up photography and attend TED conferences than take risks on the silver screen.