When Harry Met Sally is pretty much synonymous with Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm, but it’s no surprise the actress’ children find it cringeworthy.
“It’s funny, my son [Jack Quaid] 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,” Ryan, 61, told Carol Burnett in an Interview magazine profile, which was published on Friday, September 1. “My daughter [Daisy] was here and everybody was on speaker, and they were like, ‘Mom, this is a very unique embarrassment.’”
Ryan recalled that her 31-year-old son, whom she shares with ex-husband Dennis Quaid, pointed out that Katz’s has a poster dedicated to the 1989 film. “[Jack] said, ‘You know you can go into that deli and there’s an arrow pointing down to the table where you shot that scene,” she added.
The rom-com icon — who adopted daughter Daisy, 19, in 2006 — portrayed the titular Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sally opposite Billy Crystal’s Harry Burns. The movie, directed by Rob Reiner, follows polar opposites Sally and Harry as they travel across the country together and document their friends-to-lovers bond over the years.
In one now-infamous scene, Sally and Harry grab lunch at Katz’s Deli — a Lower East Side staple in New York City — as he laments about his girlfriend faking an orgasm. Sally, to prove a point, busted out her best fake orgasm to demonstrate just how easy it was to do. After her realistic moaning subsided, a fellow patron (portrayed by Reiner’s mother) chimed in. “I’ll have what she’s having,” she quipped to the waitress.
Ryan further recalled that she “probably” filmed the orgasm scene “over and over and over again.”
Director Reiner, 76, previously revealed that the take was all Ryan. “Meg said, ‘Well, I’ll do it! I’ll just actually act it out. We don’t have to talk about it,’” he said during a TCM Classic Film Festival screening of the movie in April 2019.
At the time, Reiner also gushed to Us Weekly about the film’s staying power. “You never know. You make a movie, and hopefully you like it, and hopefully other people [do too],” he told Us and other reporters. “You have no idea if it will stand the test of time, and it’s kind of cool that it did.”
Reiner continued: “I think that there are some basic truths about men and women that people connect with, and those kind of things — that dance, that weird dance that men and women do with one another kind of is basic and kind of there all of the time.”
