Packing a punch

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/02/2004 (8127 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LOS ANGELES — As disturbing as it might have been to see Meg Ryan engaging in rough sex in her last movie In the Cut, one may be even more fretful to see her in the testosterone-laced world of professional boxing in her upcoming film Against the Ropes.

Up to now, the jabs were strictly verbal in the romantic comedy genre where Ryan has enjoyed her greatest successes, trademarking a hip, savvy, vulnerable persona in hits such as Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and When Harry Met Sally.

So it’s a bit of a culture shock seeing America’s late-20th-century sweetheart in the role of flamboyant boxing manager Jackie Kallen, dressed in a series of provocative little cocktail dresses that look like they were ordered out of a back-dated Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue.

You might even find yourself getting nervous on her behalf as she takes on the vicious sexism of the boxing culture, where the ass-grab trumps the double entendre and where, typically, a women’s place is in the ring… between rounds, in a silver bikini, hoisting a card saying: “Round 3.”

Call it a case of opposites attracting.

Ryan, 42, first saw Kallen in a photograph, dressed in her usual outrageous fashion, sharing the frame with her little dog on one side and a boxer on the other.

“And I thought: What in the world is going on here? Who is this woman?” Ryan says.

Bear in mind that the Connecticut-born Ryan didn’t necessarily see herself reflected in Jackie Kallen, a Detroit sports journalist who parlayed her boxing and public relations savvy into a successful career as a boxing manager.

“It was a great investigation of a fantastic character in a really exciting and electrified world,” Ryan says. “I didn’t know anything about boxing and I came to actually really, really like it.”

But if portraying Kallen’s exterior was challenging, there was common ground, too, Ryan says. Both Kallen and Ryan have taken their share of knocks in an entertainment industry where women have to struggle.

“I was interested in playing someone that presented herself differently than me but I also loved the story of a woman navigating in an oppressive male environment that wanted to underestimate her… that wanted to put her in a box and her refusal to have that happen.”

Bear in mind that Ryan may still be smarting after the critical whupping of In the Cut, and the more personal attacks she weathered on the subject of her speculated plastic surgery.

Once a box-office darling, Ryan has seen Hollywood life from both sides now.

“It’s very easy in Hollywood to be categorized initially by how you look,” Ryan says. “And I think an empowered woman in any environment (can) arouse the anger of people. I think you can be despised for your successes as much as your failures.”

“She’s had to go through a lot of the same experiences in the film industry as I have in boxing,” Kallen says. “It’s another male-dominated world and she has risen to the top so I knew she would understand a lot of the things I had to go through.”

Kallen says, conversely, that Ryan is tougher than she looks.

“Although she appears to be the little girl next door, real sweet, inside she’s extremely intelligent and very steely and very in control,” Kallen says. “I come across as a little more outgoing and certainly tougher on the outside but on the inside, I think that I’m really a wuss. So we kind of found in each other the flip side of a coin.”

If the movie reflects some of the professional experience of the real-life Kallen, it doesn’t reflect her personal reality. Ryan’s screen Kallen, for example, is a single woman working for a boxing promoter before she takes the challenge of managing a raw talent played by Omar Epps. The real Kallen was a journalist and a married mother of two before she became a boxing manager.

Kallen is hilariously frank when asked about how she felt jettisoning her husband of 30 years for the movie.

“At first I really did fight to keep my husband and my children in the story because they are such a big part of my life,” she says. “I actually went as far as to fly my husband out to California with me as the movie was in development and say, ‘I cannot leave this man out of this story! He’s been my husband for 30 years and he’s going to hate seeing the movie and he’s not there!’

“Two weeks later, he walked out on me for someone else,” Kallen says.

“So I just called Paramount and said, ‘Make her single,'” she says with a laugh. “So now he can go to the movie and look for himself all he wants.”

In movies, and in life, revenge is sweet.

Against the Ropes opens in Winnipeg theatres next Friday, Feb. 20.