Meg Ryan, 61, looks just as vibrant as she did 30 years ago while flashing her arm tattoo in a dress to plug new rom-com as she notes fame can be ‘bizarre’

Meg Ryan was spotted heading into a talk show in Los Angeles on Wednesday night.

The 61-year-old actress looked youthful in an all-black outfit as she wore black sunglasses and black military-style boots with her blonde hair in soft waves.

The short-sleeved dress also showed off her arm tattoo that read, “Life is short.”

She looked as vibrant as she did in the 30 years she was the queen of rom-coms with hits like Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail.

The star is promoting her first romantic comedy, What Happens Later, in almost 15 years. Her costar is X-Files’ David Duchovny.

“I have fame following me around, but it comes in waves,” she explained to People.

“And for the most part, it’s just people smiling and saying hello to me.

“I have such an incredible range of different types of people in my life and friends, and I just love the variety,” says Ryan.

“If your identity is about your next project, it’s a very uncertain place to be.

“I’m not someone who wants to be a famous person at all,” she added.

‘I think I imagined I would have been happier as someone in the audience. But this put me in a place where I had to become more comfortable with attention.”

She’s ‘really not programmed that way.’

And the blonde also shared: ‘There’s a privilege in it. And there are also very strange things when people think they can talk about you or write about you in a way that you cannot identify with at all.

‘And I see that it has consequences for the people around me. People close to you get questions about you. It’s so bizarre. But I don’t get asked about it. If you want to understand it, it will take a while.’

That feeling of being true to yourself is ‘everything’ for her.

“It’s a big priority of mine not to give that away,” she said.

“The feeling of: you sleep at night, you know who you are, you feel good about those decisions, you feel good about the people in your life, you’re not going to give away your authority, your power away, you simply rest .’

Ryan adds, “It took me a while to do that. But I have a pretty good handle on that now.”

She also shed light on her decision to step back from Hollywood, following her starring roles in When Harry Met Sally.

After cementing her status as a leading lady and household name, the actress revealed why she took time away from her career ahead of the release of her ‘I took a giant break because I felt like there were just so many other parts of my experience as a human being that I wanted to develop,” the mother of two told People.

She continued, “It’s nice to see it as a job and not a lifestyle. And that’s a great way for me to navigate through it.”

In 2015, she made her directorial debut with the drama Ithaca, based on the 1943 novel The Human Comedy by William Saroyan.

For her latest project, What Happens Later, she teamed up to direct, write and star with David Duchovny.

“It came to me during lockdown,” she enthused. “The essence of it is these two people stuck together. I just love the idea of ​​us being held in a space, even though it feels conflicting, maybe for reasons that heal them.”

In a recent conversation with Carol Burnett for Interview magazine, Ryan shed light on the process of making her new film.

“Really, the easiest part was acting in it,” she said. “I want to direct again so I can sit in the chair because I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of things.”

The artist also noted, “I hadn’t done a role in a long time, but it was fun with David.”

She added: “A lot of it was done in two shots. I’m proud of that. I arranged everything in advance so that once we got there, it was just David and I trying to tell the truth.”

Meg explained that the process of putting the film together was “completely deliberate” – and was accomplished on a budget of $3 million.

‘We had to do it very quickly. A lot of those extras weren’t even ours, they were real people,” Meg revealed. “We went back to post and made the same palette for everyone. There are, thank goodness, a lot of things you can do digitally now.”

Meg rose to fame in the 1980s, playing the female love interest in hit films like the original Top Gun and When Harry Met Sally.

As the years passed, she became inextricably linked to romantic comedies, with her best-known films being Sleepless In Seattle and You’ve Got Mail.

However, her girl-next-door image took a hit in 2000 when news broke of her affair with her Proof Of Life co-star Russell Crowe.

Meg was still married to Dennis Quaid at the time, whom she later accused of being unfaithful to her for a “long time” during their relationship.

What Happens Later is the first rom-com Meg has starred in in over a decade, with the previous film in the genre being the 2009 film Serious Moonlight.

In a new trailer for What Happens Now, Meg’s character Wilhelmina and David’s character William happen to meet at an airport.

It turns out the pair are exes whose romance ended a few decades earlier – but there’s still an undeniable chemistry between them.

When both of their flights are delayed, they find themselves stuck together, waiting at the airport with nothing to do but deal with the unfinished business of their past.