Meg Ryan was seen heading into a talk show in Los Angeles on Wednesday evening.

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

The short-sleeved frock also flashed her arm tattoo that said, ‘Life is short.’

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

The star has been promoting her first romantic comedy, What Happens Later, in nearly 15 years. Her costar is David Duchovny of X-Files fame.

Cutie star: Meg Ryan was seen heading into a talk show in Los Angeles on Wednesday evening. The 61-year-old actress looked youthful in an all black outfit as she added black sunglasses and black military style boots with her blonde hair down in soft waves

Left this week in combat boots and right in 1990 at the premiere of Postcards From The Edge

‘I have fame that follows me around, but it comes in waves,’ she explained to People.

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

‘I have such an unbelievable array of different types of people in my life and friends, and I just like the variety,’ says Ryan. 

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

‘I’m not really somebody who set out to be a famous person at all,’ she added.

‘I think I imagined that I would’ve been happier as someone in the audience. But this has put me in this place where I’ve had to get more comfortable with attention.’

She is ‘really not wired that way.’ 

And the blonde also shared: ‘There’s privilege in it. And there’s also some really strange stuff about people thinking they can talk about you or write about you in a way that you just can’t relate to at all.

‘And I see it has effects on people around me. People close to you, they get asked about you. It’s so bizarre. But I don’t get asked about them. If you want to make sense of it, it’ll take a while.’

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

A Hollywood favorite: The short-sleeved frock also flashed her arm tattoo that said, ‘Life is short.’ She appeared just as vibrant as she did over 30 years when she was the queen of rom coms with hits like Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail

‘It’s a giant priority of mine to not 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 your authority away, your power away, you rest easy.’

Ryan adds, ‘It’s taken a while for me to do that. But I’m in pretty solid possession of that now.’

She also shed light on her decision to take a 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’s just so many other parts of my experience as a human being I wanted to develop,’ the mother-of-two told People.

She continued: ‘It’s nice to think of it as a job and not a lifestyle. And that is a great way of navigating it for me.’ 

Fame game: ‘I have fame that follows me around, but it comes in waves,’ she explained to People

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 tackled directing, writing and serving as its star, alongside David Duchovny. 

‘It came to me during lockdown,’ she raved. ‘The essence of it is these two people who are stuck together. I just love that idea that we’re held in a space, even if it feels conflicted, maybe for reasons that heal them.’ 

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

‘Truly, the easiest part was acting in it,’ she said. ‘I want to direct again just so I can sit in the chair, because I’m sure there’s a lot of things I missed.’

The performer also noted: ‘I hadn’t done a role in a really 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 set up everything beforehand so that once we were there, it was just David and I trying to tell the truth.’

Meg explained that the process of cobbling the film together was ‘all really deliberate’ – and accomplished on a budget of $3 million.

Memorable: Ryan famously played Sally Albright in the 1989 rom-com, When Harry Met Sally (pictured above) with Billy Crystal

This movie was and is beloved: Seen in Sleepless In Seattle in 1993

Another big hit: Seen in her 1998 film You’ve Got Mail with Tom Hanks

‘We had to do it really quickly. A lot of those extras weren’t even ours, they were real people,’ Meg revealed. ‘We went back in post and made everybody the same palette. There’s a lot of stuff you can do digitally now, thank god.’

Meg shot to stardom in the 1980s, playing the female love interest in hit movies like the original Top Gun and When Harry Met Sally.

As the years went on, she became inextricably identified with romantic comedies, with her best-known films including Sleepless In Seattle and You’ve Got Mail.

Her girl-next-door image, however, suffered a blow in 2000 when news broke of her affair with her Proof Of Life co-star Russell Crowe.

Her past love: Seen with former husband Dennis Quaid in the 1990s

At the time, Meg was still married to Dennis Quaid, whom she later accused of having been unfaithful to her ‘for a long time’ during their relationship.

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

In a newly dropped trailer for What Happens Now, Meg’s character Wilhelmina and David’s character William happen to run into each other at an airport.

It emerges that the pair of them are exes whose romance ended a couple of decades previously – but an undeniable chemistry is still detectable between them.

When both of their flights get delayed, they wind up stuck together, waiting around in the airport with nothing to do but hash out the unfinished business of their past.