How Hellmann’s brought Harry and Sally back together

It only took 36 years—36 years and one mayo ad—for Harry to reunite with Sally.

Decades after Nora Ephron’s beloved rom-com When Harry Met Sally was released, condiment brand Hellmann’s brought Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal together again for its 2025 Super Bowl ad. The 30-second spot, called “When Sally Met Hellmann’s,” sent the two lead actors back to Katz’s Delicatessen in New York for the first time since they filmed there in the ’80s, this time for a somewhat toned-down re-creation of the film’s iconic fake orgasm scene.

The reunion marks Hellmann’s fifth consecutive year in the Super Bowl and a pivot from past years’ emphasis on food waste prevention. Jessica Grigoriou, SVP of marketing for condiments at Unilever, told us that the marketing team wanted to do something “a bit more unexpected” this year and, knowing that sandwiches are popular during football games, decided to make them the focus.

“We knew we wanted to be in culture,” Grigoriou said. “When we saw this idea, we got that feeling in your gut that there’s something here.”

“It’s one of the most iconic sandwich scenes in movie history,” Susan Golkin, executive creative director at VML, which developed the ad creative, told us. “So it felt right.”

Even if it felt right, getting actors to reprise their roles after 35+ years is no small feat. We spoke with Grigoriou and Golkin about the campaign and how they pulled the reunion off.

“I’ll have what she’s having”

Beginning last September, Grigoriou said it was a full-throttle effort to bring Sally and Harry back together.

“We knew we could not do this ad if we didn’t have Meg and Billy on board,” Grigoriou said. “The scene is so beloved, and it’s so iconic [that] if we couldn’t re-create it as authentically as possible, we wouldn’t have done it, and we wouldn’t have pursued it.”

Golkin said her team first went to Warner Brothers for approval, then Ryan and Crystal, and then Katz’s. “There were so many people that had to say, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ to quote Meg, along the way,” she said. “It was nerve-wracking because at any point if one person said no, the whole thing fell apart.”

As that was happening, Grigoriou said her team considered backup ideas that weren’t as talent-dependent, but kept their fingers crossed. “This idea was by far our favorite and our lead,” she said.

In an interview with People, Crystal said it was the first time he and Ryan had been approached with an offer like this, and Ryan told the magazine that the brand “came to [them] with just an enormous amount of respect…for the source material and for the characters.”

With the necessary yeses secured, Harry, Sally, and a camera crew reconvened at Katz’s on December 10. There was a script, but Grigoriou said they let Ryan and Crystal improvise a lot of the lines, like Crystal’s “Lunch and a show!” remark that shows up in an extended cut of the ad. Being open, she said, allowed them to capture some of the authentic chemistry and banter between the two actors.

“The minute they sat down at that table, they were Sally and Harry,” Golkin said. “They took on the character traits and the personas, and they just became those characters.”

Details down to the camera pans and angles were based on the original scene, Golkin said, and her team even spoke with director Rob Reiner and used exact lenses that were used to shoot the movie.

Something old, something new

For fans of the source material, there were plenty of Easter eggs throughout the campaign. Crystal’s character wears his signature cable-knit sweater at a different point in the movie, but Grigoriou said its popularity prompted the marketing team to incorporate it into the ad and the campaign, sending “Hellmann’s cream” sweaters to influencers like Alix Earle and Eloise Dufka. Fans who watched Hellmann’s teaser may have also picked up on Sally’s very particular ordering style. And before the ad dropped, Ryan posted a photo on Instagram that mirrors the final scene in the movie.

While the ad plays heavily on nostalgia, it was also designed to reach younger people through the surprise Sydney Sweeney cameo at the end, Grigoriou said. Sweeney’s line, “I’ll have what she’s having,” was originally delivered in the movie by Rob Reiner’s mother, Estelle Reiner.

“There was something really interesting to flip the script and have a younger woman looking upon this couple,” Grigoriou said. “When we looked at who this person could be, there’s something we loved about having [it be] this generation’s rom-com star.”

Hellmann’s internal research found that 95% of people had seen or at least heard of the original scene from When Harry Met Sally, Grigoriou said. Golkin noted that even among Gen Z, the movie is looked at with reverence for its depiction of what they view as the “glory days” of dating.

“I think the beauty of this scene is that it transcends demographics and it transcends age and it transcends generations,” Golkin said. “It’s either nostalgia [for what] they lived through or nostalgia for what they wish they had lived through.”

The Super Bowl isn’t the end of the campaign for Hellmann’s, and the ad is slated to continue running through May. With Valentine’s Day around the corner, the brand will also host a screening of When Harry Met Sally in partnership with Dotdash Meredith and People Magazine, and it will post creator content centered on meet-cutes and asking couples if they can guess each other’s favorite sandwich orders.

While fans might be pining for a sequel, Golkin said knowing there likely won’t be one made the creative idea more special.

“To us, this was it. This was the only sequel that we would have,” Golkin said. “We knew everybody deeply wanted to see [Crystal and Ryan] back together again—and they really seemed to enjoy being back together again.”