Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan co-starred in many popular rom-coms, but they did miss each other in one classic film.
Hanks’ wife, Rita Wilson, says he balked at starring in “When Harry Met Sally,” because he couldn’t relate to the Harry character.
“People probably don’t know this, but Tom was offered ‘When Harry Met Sally’ and he turned it down because he was going through a divorce and he was very happy to be not married,” Wilson said on the "Table for Two With Bruce Bozzi" podcast on June 13.
“And so he could not understand that a person going through a divorce would have anything other than just like, ‘I’m so happy.’”
At the time the movie was being made, Hanks was divorcing his first wife, Samantha Lewes.
Billy Crystal took on the Harry role in the 1989 hit and has embraced it over the years. He celebrated turning 75 earlier this year by re-creating a look from the movie and had some fun parodying the film’s infamous orgasm scene in a 2019 episode of “The Late Late Show with James Corden.”
Crystal also talked about the impact of that scene when he attended a screening of the movie at the 2019 TCM Classic Film Festival in Los Angeles in honor of the comedy’s 30th anniversary. He noted that he felt the movie would be a hit after he and director Rob Reiner saw an advanced screening before it was released.
“(It was) the first time people saw it and it was the first time the orgasm scene — I have to call it that — played, and the laughs were insanely great,” Crystal told “Entertainment Tonight.” “When that scene ended, we realized he and I were holding hands because it was so intense in the theater, the laughs were so amazing, that we knew that there was something special.”
Reiner also said Crystal was the perfect choice.
“It turned out way better than anything I could have imagined because not only was he great in the part, it made our friendship better,” he told Variety in 2019.
Hanks and Ryan, meanwhile, would go on to collaborate multiple times, starring together in the comedies “Joe Versus the Volcano,” “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.”
He also won back-to-back best actor Oscars for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump.”