Columbia Pictures
‘I’ll have what she’s having’: Meg Ryan in that scene from When Harry Met Sally.
It has to be one of the most talked about movie scenes of all time – that one in the 1989 movie When Harry Met Sally, starring “friends” Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan.
You know the one; it’s the one in the coffee shop where Sally fakes an orgasm bringing the entire shop to a standstill, prompting an older customer to say “I’ll have what she’s having”. Which has to be one of the best lines ever.
Now, Ryan has talked about that scene filmed in Katz’s Deli in an interview with Carol Burnett in the online Interview magazine, published this week. And we are told it took a lot of takes: “Oh, we probably did that over and over again,” she said.
Bleecker Street
Meg Ryan as Willa in What Happens Later, a new release with actor David Duchovny, directed by Ryan herself.
And then she admits her adult children, Jack Quaid and Daisy Ryan, are still embarrassed by it: “It’s funny, my son just called me this morning and he’s in New York staying at a hotel that’s right across the street from Katz’s Deli.
“My daughter was here and everybody was on speaker, and they were like, ‘Mom, this is a very unique embarrassment. He said, ‘You know you can go into that deli and there’s an arrow pointing down to the table where you shot that scene’.”
BLEECKER STREET
Ex-lovers, Bill (David Duchovny) and Willa (Meg Ryan) reunite when they both become stranded in an airport overnight.
Her son has spoken of the scene previously, in a 2019 interview with Instyle, where he said: “It’s one of those things, where if you really think about it, you don’t want to see your mom having a fake orgasm in a deli when you’re growing up. I avoided it.”
Quaid, an actor himself (The Boys, Plus One), had said he would never watch the movie.
But of course he did eventually watch it, because he was doing his own rom-com, which was his “excuse”: “I have to watch the rom-com, and the movie’s so much more than that scene,” he told Interview.
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images
Actor Jack Quaid is the son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid. He made his acting debut with a minor role in The Hunger Games.
He said he was “unbelievably proud” of his mum.
And it turns out the recent Interview chat was a two-way love fest. We learn that comedian Carol Burnett was Ryan’s childhood comedic hero, being one of the first women to do a variety show (the Carol Burnett Show 1967-1978).
Ryan, star of other movie greats, including Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, has directed and stars in a new film, What Happens Later – her first romantic comedy since Serious Moonlight in 2009.
A Times article from 2016 estimated that, adjusted for inflation, Ryan’s 30 films have made US$2.3 billion (NZ$3.8b).
