Michelle Williams
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And so you're constantly assessing your own comfort with danger and your own ability to keep yourself safe. So when you learn that with an impartial teacher like nature, you can take that into the rest of your life and really fall back into yourself and say, I know myself to be a person who makes good decisions. I know myself to be somebody who can keep myself safe and balanced.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And that feedback loop that a child gets when they decide which rocks are the safe rocks, which one isn't slippery, which one isn't too pointy, when they're quite literally getting their footing, it is feeding their body with information about how to take risks. It's very challenging to figure out how to do that today. Denmark is a great place to do that. You were just doing what the Danes do.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
We are so like-minded. I mean, don't get me started talking about cell phones.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
My parents did. I was quite happy there. It was such a good life. But the winter that we moved, it hadn't gotten above 40 below. So off to San Diego we went.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, it was a real shock. I don't think I'd seen a freeway before. I was surprised that everybody's house looked like everybody else's house. These big swaths of tract housing developments built along a freeway. And you know, when you're a kid, you don't really feel the cold.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It doesn't register with you as something that you have to gird yourself for because you have so many fun things that you can do in the cold. Yeah. Now at 44, I'm like, whew, I'm cold. Can't handle it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, we went to go see a play in my memory, sort of an abandoned shopping mall and the ceiling is dripping and the folding chairs are metal. And you walk through a backstage where you see these child actors in various stages of hair and makeup and playing games and braiding each other's hair and costumes. And so I saw the kind of inner workings and then we watched this play.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
That's what I really love. Right, right, right, right. That's my favorite part. The behind the scenes, the people, the community, the friendships, the safe space, the chosen family. That's the stuff that I really get excited about.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I just remember holding on to my seat thinking it was going to take off like I was on an airplane because I was so transported into this play that I was watching with kids my age. And they seemed like they were having so much fun and singing and dancing. And I thought, oh, I'd like to be a part of this, whatever this thing is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And so that continued to be something that I did the whole time that I was in San Diego. Always more of a chorus girl. More like an orphan son's name. Just back row tapper.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Songs like that, they hook into you and then you think you should spend your whole life singing them and you would be a happy person.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, I really wanted to sing and dance. That just looked like a whole lot of fun to me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Born with just enough talent to cobble together the ability to do this. A passable voice and some workable feet, but not prodigious.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, I have enough musicality that I can pull certain things off and also have an ear for accents.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah. And your trauma could come later. So your humor could develop. Exactly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
That's the best combo. I've never been described like this and I didn't know that I had the ability to unnerve anyone.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I've already gotten that. You guys, just get me on that bus and let me show you when there's not a microphone in my face, okay?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Let's take it elsewhere. I'm obsessed with your wife. She changed our life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It was incredible. I remember the day that People magazine said that they would stop publishing photos of children. And I was like, wow, this whole structure collapsed because it had been such a problem for us for so many years and had limited our life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
unmanageable, unlivable, but I didn't know what to do. I just cried and moved to a different place. Then to see these ideas that you guys were having and then this action around it and then this change. I wrote to her at the time and I
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I sent her a picture of Matilda smiling on the beach because before that, Matilda didn't like to have her photo taken because that experience was taken from her and she didn't feel ownership over her image. And so even with friends and family, that was a place where she could express a boundary and say, no, I don't want my picture taken. But when that system crumbled, she smiled forever.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I think that what happens is that people assume those children have other advantages. And so they aren't able to empathize with them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, something that they shouldn't have to think about.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
No, I was just a girl running in a bikini. On the beach and inviting him to a party. Wait, were you really? Oh, yeah. At 12? Oh, no. Oh, no. Wow. Times really have changed. Yes, just a girl jogging in a bikini. As we do. Very normal.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, I really was. That's a three, four year span of time. So it was guest thing here, guest thing there, commercial here, commercial there. Enough to keep going and to be sustenitive. You're going out on three things a day.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, Mom's Driving. There's some other kids in San Diego and there's just kind of this idea in the air that, hey, you can go to L.A. and you can audition for things and then you might be in Hollywood.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And there were some people who fell under that spell and there were some minivans doing that shuttle back and forth and you'd go to your cattle call and then you'd go get a cookie at the mall and you'd turn around and do your homework in the back seat by a little car light and go home.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I know. I'll tell you what, it really makes me feel like that skull right there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Are you sure that that was this lifetime that we're talking about? Because, Charlie, you can't do that anymore. It's a very strange thing because you have all these child labor laws. And when you're a child actor, you need to have a tutor. You can only work a certain number of hours. And you need to have a guardian, like a social worker who's concerned with your safety.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And if you do something called being emancipated, you don't have to have any of those. You're an adult. Nobody's looking after you. Nobody's teaching you. And you can work whenever you want. Whatever they want. Exactly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It was an idea. Other kids were doing it. There was a movie of the week about it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Then it just sort of happened. Because I was a child, I don't fully know the ins and outs of it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, who couldn't really see into the future to understand ramifications or what practical life would look like. Then now, looking back and feeling, I'm just so lucky.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
15. I was sort of bouncing around those valley apartments.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I probably have some friends from the past. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Guys, that's so fun and amazing. Kids must love that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, I got emancipated at 15 and a half. And then I got Dawson's Creek when I was 16. So then I was transported very quickly to Wilmington, North Carolina, which was a much safer, sounder environment to be a young person on their own.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, I think it was. And I thank God that I got that show and that it plucked me out and landed me on this sleepy southern coastal town. And that I had a job to go to and a place to be responsible to and met a few people there that are still in my life that I love very much that are so much a part of me and had some kind of stability.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It was really great and I really wanted it and I was so excited. And you know, when you go on so many auditions and you get down to the wire on things, there's so many heartbreaks that you go through as a child actor. The things that you almost get or the things that you never hear from again, even though you wanted them so badly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Your heart endures a lot when you are a kid trying to deal with mass rejection daily.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
But they did not do, let's be honest, it was correspondence school.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Pre-internet. So I'd like for you to imagine what that might look like.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
This is not a good endorsement for school. No, no. The only thing that matters to me is my kids going to college. Were you a reader? I did read. I loved books. So I had that on my side. I could always just turn to a book if I had a question about something in life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, and I would read novels, but I would also read books about history. I mean, the gaps in my knowledge, they're everywhere. So I would go to Barnes & Noble and not only would I get the novels that I wanted to read, but I would also get an incomplete education or a beginner's guide to world geography.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I'm so jealous. They have bunk beds. That's my absolute dream for my kids. I once took Matilda in like an RV on like a big road trip and I was like, this is the greatest. Oh my God, it's incredible for kids. Like I want to get like an old VW bus and like retrofit it. Make it cute.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, and you want to be able to cross-pollinate and to be able to sit next to anybody and have a point of contact for their frames of reference. That became clear to me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, I think I thought I was an adult before. The people that I was on the show with, they weren't not my age, but they were also a little bit older where they were like, she's 16. Okay. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I made some local friends, but again, they weren't my age. And I am very close with Mary Beth Peel, who played my grams. I felt like it was an ageless relationship. But I don't know if I had met another 16 year old who was at the local high school that I would have been like, what are you doing after school today? Right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I'm going to go make a box of pasta and heat up some tomato sauce.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I've never really felt lonely, to be honest, because I had all those early rambling experiences in nature. And so I was sort of conditioned to that. I didn't feel lonely at all. I had a car. There were three bookstores. There was a record store. I lived near the beach. Maybe I'm just saying that in retrospect, but it was a great place to be young. And then Busy joined the show. Ah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I don't know, how old were we? 18 or something? I can't really remember, but we've been best friends ever since. So that was the end of anything that I might've experienced as loneliness.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I love parasocially watching the two of your relationship.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It's so sweet. We're like, those two things shouldn't go together. And yet they do. And yet they do.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
That's exactly the word that I would use. It's an A storyline, not a B storyline. And it's enough to sustain years, decades, a lifetime. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I'm already sending them to bus school. I thought we had an agreement.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
No, because there was room for both. I did this movie when I was young called Me Without You that shot in the UK and they accommodated it in our work schedule to allow me to go back and forth to do this movie that I was dying to do. It's also not like I was getting a million offers to go do other things. There was enough for me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I did. I think that Dawson's Creek was even nice enough to like let me dye my hair and then wear a wig on their show. So it was allowing for a variety of experiences. And then we got that summer break because I think we shot nine months a year. And then you would have the opportunity to go do something else during the summer if something came up.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I didn't really think in the future like that necessarily. I wasn't career focused. I was just finding myself yearning for something, drawn towards it, living in all the desire for it, and then would occasionally have the opportunity to do it and be given these chances. Some of it, I think I got lucky. Like they didn't even know what Dawson's Creek was. I did a Vin Vendors movie.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I don't know. I have to think about that. It might be a little too late for me. Oh. You said that so flirty. You never meet at a party. I got up that early. Yeah. It's my favorite thing about coming to LA because by nine o'clock, I'm totally comatose and I can't even fight it and pretend to stay up and keep accomplishing. It feels like just being drugged. I feel like I'm put under and I love it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I couldn't believe that I'd been cast by Vin Vendors. I was like, well, this is it. I quit. I'm going to fold my cards. This hand is too good. And then he saw a picture of me from Dawson's Creek or something. And he was like, oh, if I had known, I would not have cast. Oh, no.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
So I think I probably was up against something externally. But internally, it was just a very pure yearning on my part to make contact with other kinds of work and other kinds of human experiences. So much of it is just staying in the game and staying calm and staying patient.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Oh, wow. Then I owe somebody a thank you. I did not know that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I still feel like that. I'm like, well, who knows? Because an ecstatic experience doesn't always relate to a great thing and a terrible experience. Sometimes you're like, they polished that turd. It's so hard to, when you're in something, really have an idea of how it's going to be received. I would say impossible.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And at that point, I hadn't really been in anything either that had enjoyed a reception. So it certainly wasn't on my mind.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
For sure. I mean, he's such a beautiful person. artist and has this incredible body of work. And the Annie Proulx story that it's based on and then the adaptation, it's undeniable material. And so brought together under Ang Lee probably is going to be a good thing, but would anyone see it? It's about gay men, which was not really being done.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It's a really beautiful way to look at it. I like that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
No, with a baby. But I suppose maybe it's a good thing about being young is that you don't have so much life experience that you can contextualize things. So you're really just going with the flow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Kids are such great life checkers. They force you to put your best self in front of them. You can't abdicate your life and your work and your own desires, but you do have to put them in check and figure out which master you're going to serve. Because the truth is, if work is going well, somebody else is taking care of the kids. And if You're in a high point with your kids.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
The work is shoved to the side. So you can't be equally good at them at the exact same time. And you have to allow for that give and take, but then also replenish the other things. If you have a big period of being at home, you need to go back to what you've left unattended and put some light over there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
So I think it's just this constant back and forth, but making sure that you don't leave one of them unattended for too long.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
My best day with my children is better than my best day at work. I am more thrilled with that high than I am with a work high. So I return to that feeling. You know, when am I really, really at my happiest? And it's when I feel like things are going well with my kids. I've got them in a good place and they're feeling understood.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I used to say to Matilda, it tastes better to me when you eat it. Oh, that's so sweet. And that's kind of the feeling that I get with them. But again, I want them to see their mom working all of my kids. So it's not something that I want to neglect for too long, but the kids really pull at you more convincingly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I think I always just assumed that I would, but I wasn't a natural babysitter or have a lot of dollies. That wasn't my thing, but I just assumed, yeah, I'm going to be a mom. But I really wanted to be like a mom of a teenager. I was like, ah, teenage girl.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I just wanted to do it right. I just wanted to be like in there with her and understanding her and taking her side. That's where I wanted to be.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I similarly learned by parenting, oh, actually, when I make mistakes in front of my daughter and own up to them and apologize, it teaches her to make mistakes and say, oopsie, mommy, I'm sorry. And it's not a big deal. It's a part of life. And we move on. No shame, no blame. Just you made a mistake. Beautiful. I made five already today.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
That's because you thought there was a reason to hide things, something that you were afraid of.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
But then you corrected it. Now your kids pass that on and it stops with you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It's also that chair is like a sound absorber. It really is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
But it's so hard not to fondle their little tendrils of hair on their head.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I wish that I could be the person to answer that question for you and give you the fulfillment and satisfaction. But what is Charlie Kaufman like? Other than an artist without parallel. But I can't get in there. I don't know. Yeah. Okay. That's a big one. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
We took a break in the filming. We shot the first part when they're young and in love and everything's going really well. And then we took a two week break and we lived together office hours, baby, like nine to five. Okay. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Professional situation. So we did these improvisations during the day, honestly, to figure out ways to annoy each other. Sure. And to destroy this thing that we had made because we weren't even going to take that break. But we were having such a hard time letting go of the thing that we loved. Derek was like, we got to mess this up and we need to burn it down.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And we did a ceremonial burned our wedding photo. And then we learned how to annoy each other.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, a lot of it. Derek, the director, would come in and give us a kind of... Scenario? Yeah, and then we would be left to do it. And then he would say, after you've had this frustrating day, now you're going to go take your daughter to the amusement park and try and have a good time. Ah. Yeah, it's fun. I don't know if anybody could work like that again because you've got a crew that's on hold.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
You're paying people. I mean, it's such a small movie, so low budget and a small crew. But you're taking a big down period in the middle of the thing. And to what end? Playing, you know, exploring. Try and justify that to a producer. But that's what we did. You get it in the movie.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I know. It was horrible. I don't want to give you reasons to hate me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
We were having such a good time. The party has to be over so soon.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, I really was. And I was younger then. And the hard day at work for me now, I feel it and I go through it, but I definitely know that I get to go home. I can really close the door on it. When I was younger, it would definitely seep under the door.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I was like, you don't have to hate me. Now I hate me. Right? Yeah. annoying and we are calling forth to all of our worst qualities. And now you can't hate me more than I hate myself. That's intense.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Well, it's like the end of Some Like It Hot. And he's like, but I'm this and I'm this. I'm a man. And he says, well, nobody's perfect.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And actually, it's not but, it's with. That actually, that is exactly who they love. It's inclusive of that. It's because of that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It's because. These are the human pieces. Yeah, when you love somebody, you have to take the whole pie. And so it's a because. So enjoy your ability and the way that they love you in that moment because they do.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
No, I was dying to do that. I had an eight-year-old daughter, and I was going to play Glinda the Good Witch. I've cooked up a real steak for us on this one, darling. I know. Wait till you come to mommy's job and you go to the costume department and we put some rhinestones on your face. Yeah. There's a flying monkey. This is going to be so fun. And we had the best time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
We lived in Detroit and she went to school there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
We were in Birmingham and she went to Roper. You know about Roper?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Boy, oh boy, I thought, well, maybe we should just live in Detroit. We're very happy here. We still have friends from that time, people that we're still in touch with. We lived in a neighborhood. We lived in a house. We had a community. I had friends. She had friends. And I was a fairy princess every day. It was great.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It was directed by the wonderful Sam Raimi, who gave Matilda the best experience. He would let her call action and she would sit in the director's chair and she would come and he would say, there is my most honored guest, Matilda. Make way, everyone. I'm always impressed when people are in circumstances where they have so much going on.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
They see an opportunity for somebody who needs a little extra and they go to it, even though they have their hands full. And he did that day in, day out.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
You can still do it. I'm already jealous. I sat on a bus and I'm jealous.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
You're invited. I can't even tell you how into this I am. I once, for Thanksgiving, rented an RV in Nevada, drove with Matilda to spend Thanksgiving at the animal shelter where you could sleep with a variety of animals in your room. Oh, my goodness. Pigs. Oh. Yes, we did. Dogs. Yes, we did. Cats. You could have animal sleepovers. Wow. Oh, wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
So we did an animal sleepover, animal sanctuary Thanksgiving, and then we went to Zion in our RV. Have you done that, Park?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
What a place. But I thought I had done enough by renting an RV. I was like, pretty good. Look at me, I'm driving an RV. No, you need to check clearances. You have to check park entrance and exit time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I hadn't really masterminded the situation and then found corkscrewing down to the bottom of Zion and our RV wasn't allowed to pass back up for our sunset horseback ride because of a height requirement. I was like, no, no. This isn't happening. Oh, no. I have taken on more than I should have. But I want to get back into the RV life, but I'm a little.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
You have a very steady, calming voice. Oh, thank you so much. Who were you talking to? My God, Dex just exploded. I have to tune in. You know, it's a tough day for NPR.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
That was me. I love that life. I want that life. And just as a little sidebar tidbit, I think you'll appreciate it. In COVID, we had had a baby and because of COVID, my mother hadn't been able to meet the baby. And she decided she was fed up with that. And they had a little boat and they sold their little boat.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And instead they bought a camper, attached it to their pickup, and they drove from Seattle, Washington to upstate New York so that they could meet the baby. Oh. Deep COVID. She had packed the freezer with enough food to last for a week, didn't enter a grocery store, rest, stop, anything. RV lifed all the way. Oh, nice. I know. It's in my blood. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Just nominated. You were just nominated? Yeah, I'm sorry to correct that fact. No, you won. Thank you. Maybe it's a premonition. Maybe it's coming up.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It's a terrible schedule. But when your children grow up and they aren't as able to drop into the Roper school for half a year and they really need to put roots down, you realize, oh, like I'm a plane that's been grounded. We have to give her a sense of permanence and structure and dependability. So I need to work from home. And it looks like that Broadway is not going anywhere.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
So is this something that I can learn in enough time to figure out how to do it and make it a part of my life so that I can have the opportunity to work from home?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
That's how I like to do things, figure it out while I'm plummeting, which I honestly really do relate to that childhood in nature. I really see a direct correlation from that kind of risk taking to the kind of risk taking that I enjoy in my work. Because in my life, I'm not like a thrill person or a roller coaster person or highs kind of person, but I enjoy it in my work.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And I think it's because I learned it as a child.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Some things I look at, I'm like, I have no idea. There's no spark. The rest of the time, there's a tiny little spark and then a big cloud around it. But it's the spark that I stay connected to. And that's what makes me say, I'll try. But there has to be just this teeny tiny little mustard seed.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
No, no, you're skimming over dick and lots of fun things in there. Lots of laughs.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
What are we going to do? What's the plan? I think the plan might be to get in your bus.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I'm very lucky. I have totally manageable pregnancies.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I know you would on the bus. I have in the past taken off pretty big chunks of time because when you work 15 hours a day for six months on something, you really need to slow down and recharge and reestablish your routines and your life. And then in there, there was COVID and two strikes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
A whole host of things. Yeah, I was really thrilled when we had a baby in COVID. That really livened things up. I was like, welcome to the quarantine. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
For the next year and a half, you're going to think life works like this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I'm starting a job on Sunday and it hurts. I don't know that I would call it guilt necessarily. It hurts me and it feels biologically incorrect that I am going to spend this certain amount of time away from my children. But it feels... like the correct model to give them. So it hurts my heart, but my head, I think, understands it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Then when I'm with them, I just try to let them feel my full presence so that when I'm not with them, I can really extract and go do the work that I need to do in the way that I need to do it. It's like a back and forth. It's not how I would like to live. I'm very creature of habit. It's hard for me to jump in and out all the time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
But that's what I tell myself is how to just kind of manage my feelings around it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, it does a few things. For a long time as a single mother, that was how I supported us. So of course, it's in total, utter necessity. It is how our life runs. And now, being in a marriage, I contribute to my family and to mainly the desires and needs and what I want to put in front of my children. But I also am leaving a record of who I am and who I was.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And the things that I was interested in, because, you know, when you're a kid, you look at your parents and you're like, you're my mom. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And I throw a plate on the floor and... You deal with it. You kind of deal with it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
So I've often thought about work as a way to leave a record for my children should they want to pick it up about who I was in my entirety. Mothering is the large piece of the pie, but there are other aspects. What if we don't have enough time to get to know each other more completely? If you want to pick up some artifacts along the way, these parts were also me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It's very novel. I'm sad nobody can see my face right now.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
This is why I save my journals and all my stuff and just think you might not be curious about it at all. You might be like, yeah, no, I had enough of her.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It was a podcast and then Liz Merriweather had written one script. So there was just a pilot episode and the podcast and the one, two punch of them. I was like, oh, there's the spark and the cloud. And now I have to go figure this thing out. But then I got pregnant again. And so it put it on a hiatus.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And then after I was through postpartum and breastfeeding fog and all that stuff, I picked up the phone and I was like, did they ever make that show I really wanted to do? Who did that? And they said, no one. And I was like, oh, great. Then Liz and I picked up our conversation again and never stopped.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Even at times where it may or may not be appropriate.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I'm going to go back to Brooklyn and give her that warning. Okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Well, even that you're using the word caught. Yes, exactly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I'm going to write you a part where you get to do both.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I'm also just like thinking like, what would I do in that school?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, I actually think that's a pretty good way to put it. I'm not going to let small fears get in my way because I want the totality of it. And if there are some things along the way that make me a little bit uncomfortable, I'm going to figure out a way through them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And he's weirdly so good at it, even though he's the most menschy, wonderful human. He has really studied the other side and come back to stick it to them in the form of this character. You're like, oh, the good guy, you know, the good husband who really is actually just afraid of your...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
inherent feminine power and ideas and intelligence, but has somehow managed to get along under the guise of good guy. There's so many scenarios in the show and so many different sexual encounters and positions that I've never found myself in where on a TV show before. And so my memories of it are so strong because humor is such a grounding force for a memory.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
You don't want to remember the thing that's so sad. You want to remember the thing that has humor attached to it. And my recall for certain pieces of work can be so spotty. And this, I can bring it all back in my mind because I was like, oh, that was that wonderful actor that I peed on. Ah! I'll never, ever, ever forget him.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It's so indelible because they are all first time experiences and they're all with the baseline of Liz's dangerous sense of humor.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I really have to tell Liz to watch out for herself. She's got like a whip on her pen or something.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
She's gone through a diagnosis and breast reconstruction and a huge medical process. And she desires connection and pleasure and satisfaction, even with her husband. And he's no longer able to see her as a sexual being. She's a patient for him.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, the caretaker. And then she gets a terminal diagnosis in the midst of all of this, which is just a lightning bolt. And she cleaves her life down the center and splinters it off and gets in this little boat. And off she goes and she grabs her best friend and she's like, we're moving away from here and we're going to go into uncharted territory and let's do it together.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I listened to the podcast twice and it just unraveled me. I was so overwhelmed with emotion, which is kind of an unusual experience. I don't want to cry. I don't really want to feel...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
One of my little guys is a dino man. And we just got that new Apex at the Museum of Natural History. Ooh.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, a little work-wise, personal. I can take it on, but I can more deal with it in my head or abstract suffering. That is something that now I process through my brain instead of my heart. And this show is like an arrow in me and I couldn't understand how it had bypassed all these defenses that I thought I had put up. gotten behind the wall.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I think it was her bravery to live her death as she lived her life, which is to make it her own and to really open it up and look at death and look at how to stay creative inside of it, how to not become a fixed identity cancer patient. Once something so catastrophic happens to you, to fight for other aspects, to stay in that room, to be a whole person.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yes, even though you know that it's happening, which is really the storyline of all of our lives. The storyline of our life is dying.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It's just a timeline issue, but we are able to kind of protect ourselves from it and pretend that it's far enough away that we don't need to deal with it or really even know what it is, what happens, what it looks like, what it feels like, and how you can be in charge of it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
You didn't want somebody telling you what you couldn't do. Hold on.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It's a perfect stegosaurus specimen. That's cool.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
No, I'd always just put on two pairs of pantyhose. You know what I mean?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Really no response to that. No, the times they are a changing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I really enjoyed it. I wasn't sure how I was going to feel because I definitely don't like to be told what to do. I like to do my own thing. I just don't like things in my way. I like to have my space. And it truly was much more like the experience of having a choreographer who's really helping you and not school marming you, who's really helping you to create a convincing simulation of something.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Also to make sure, you know, if you get into this business, there's probably something wrong with you. I mean, it's the circus. You don't run away and join the circus if you're not running away from something. So I think that that means that performers bring with them a rich personal history. And I applaud this move forward.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I think, I think. Look, I'm working really hard to catch up to his level of dino knowledge.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Maybe you don't need an intimacy coordinator, but you don't know what your co-star has been through. You don't know what your scene partner is dealing with. And this allows them the safety and dignity of being able to just tell one person what they can and cannot do. And keep their job. So I'm all for it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I think though it can be adjusted and it can change, but there's one person who knows the safe word. Like you might go to the intimacy coordinator and say, I want to fuck.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
But, you know, you might say nothing's off limits for me. I am completely comfortable and I have nothing that you need to know about. And so there's no workaround there. They're not like, well, you're not allowed. to do that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It's just like if somebody else has boundaries, something that they don't want to show, something they don't want touched, the intimacy coordinator protects that without it being obvious to the rest of the crew. Nope, so-and-so won't do that. They have a personal history. But the truly great thing about it though is because you are simulating something, you have to sell it for that lens.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I might be doing what I think, but it's not translating because of where the camera is. So it's not selling that this thing is actually happening. And one of the things I thought was so valuable with intimacy coordinator is she could help you sell it to a frame. Jay and I both know that I'm giving him a blow job. We're fine with that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And we know what that might look like and what that might ask each of us to do. But we don't know how to simulate a blow job. Totally. How do you not make it look like you're bobbing for apples? How do you create the proper tension? And now this is a job that's been around for a while. When intimacy coordinators first came on the scene, you're like, you were a PA yesterday.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Like, what do you mean you're the intimacy coordinator? It's like the COVID officers too. You're a COVID safety officer based on what?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
So they were these kind of made up jobs to meet a moment. But now these jobs have become really fulfilled and filled by skilled, qualified people. And we really relied on her expertise.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Fantastic. His birthday's coming up. Thank you so much.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It's so hard, too, because you know that that monitor is going out. There's taps all over the set. There's dailies.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I always feel like the worst thing that can happen to you on a set is that you're going to be embarrassed. Embarrassment, we can live with that. The stakes aren't as high as they are in real life. Look, the stakes are high because you want to do a good job and you want to get another job and you want to continue to have a livelihood. But embarrassment, we can live with.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I think it's why my son loves me. It's a big point of connection for us that Montana is home to so many dinosaurs, especially the myasora, the great mother lizard.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Thank you. That's what we were going for. We were like, is there such a thing? Because the camera is the male gaze. And is it even possible to make a camera a female gaze? So that was definitely something that was on our mind while we were making the show.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And the defining dangerous genius of Liz Merriweather. Because, you know, when you're making a show like this, the scripts keep coming. You sign on to a show, but you don't have all eight episodes. You don't know what the heck's going to happen. You've got one episode and you're kind of crossing your fingers. She just hits them out of the park. Script after script. We're shooting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
She's show running and writing and editing. All these things that go into the title showrunner and then delivering these scripts.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I've thought about what is gallows humor? It's not really laughing at something or making a joke because something is sad. The humor is ever present. It's just the ability and the desire to locate it, to say, I want to attach laughter to this experience. Because you could just look through the whole thing darkly. You could just say, oh, this didn't go the way I wanted it to.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
This didn't go the way I wanted it to. And I'm dying of cancer. And the real life Molly in the podcast, she has this totally innocent bemusement about the situations that she would find herself in and also a complete lack of judgment about what people wanted to do and what their bodies craved and how she was a part of that and how it made her own body feel. She was this observer.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And also, I don't want to use the word angel because she's like a very real person, but she was looking for the best version of things and sitting in a neutral space about bodies. Even when she's talking about her cancer treatments and what's happening to her body and how her body is failing and all of the secretions that a body can make and that they're happening in tandem.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
We're deep in. And so my real claim to fame inside my home is that I am also from Montana, land of many dinosaurs.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And sickness is something that is being done to your body and your body is... acting against your own will, and that sexuality is something where you can have strong ideas. You can sort of both be in control and out of control, influenced by the other person, and then learning more about yourself in the process of it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And that these two kind of bodily experiences, both full of feeling and surprises and smells, she found a way to hold both experiences right until the very end. She was in hospice and she was still looking for ways to appreciate and love her own body. She really loved putting on like beautiful lingerie.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
She would take a picture and she would send a sexy selfie and some guy would be like, oh, that was amazing, thank you. She refused to deny herself any pleasure in the midst of all this pain.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, because how do you know what you want until you try it? If you've been conditioned to believe that a certain kind of sexuality is acceptable, okay, normal, how do you even know what's out there? And how do you know if you like it or don't like it or if it's for you?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I grew up in a town called Kalispell, which was quite small when I was growing up, but now it's become kind of a big box town. Kalispell is a beautiful place, but it's close to Whitefish Lake, Flathead Lake, and God bless you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
A patriarchy? Yeah, yeah. But things that we've inherited make that bucket that bucket. I hope that the generational turnover is going to drain that bucket into the bucket of, first of all, normal, acceptable, great, pleasurable, and also... personal.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
It belongs to you. I remember I asked Nikki, I was like, what did people say when Molly found out she had stage four and she was dying? And then told everybody that she was going on this sexual journey. Did that open her up to any judgment where people like, oh my God, you're never going to believe what Molly is doing. She was like, nobody did. And I was like, that's great.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Well, she's got amazing friends then because there wasn't chatter about it. But I think we're worried what people would think or what people would say.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yes, the right way to do it. Her refusal of that and also her desire to control it, to know what it was and to say when enough was enough. Childbirth and death are like these portals, but they're so medicalized. But that in each experience, you have the ability to say, I've experienced enough pain and my body is done with that aspect of this. But to know the timelines of things.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
We know, oh, when your water breaks, you'll probably go into labor and 36 hours. But death just isn't a part of our conversation. We don't know the bodily function of it and we don't see it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Right. And also the hope that what if there's more? And the treatment cycles that a person has to go through. I haven't been with somebody at the end of their life. That's not something that I... know intimately. But I know that the information is so powerful to have hospice care.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
You can have a death doula in the same way that you used to have a birth doula, but somebody who really supports you and walks you through and helps you do it on your own terms. And it helps you understand end of life care. I know somebody actually who switched from being a birth doula to being a death doula. That place is so information rich. There's so much encoded stuff about really how to live.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
and to be witness and to give that person the experience that they want in their body.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
What a swing is right. I had a very small target to hit.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, they were like, no, no, it's safe. He's wearing a cup. Just swing as hard as you can and just hit the cup. I was like, you really trust me to do this?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
And then act at the same time. It's just going to be like hitting a mark.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
We have a minivan, which I pretend is a motorhome. I treat it like a motorhome. We've got survival, you know, we've got all the like snacks. Yeah, we got all the stuff. It's my starter motorhome.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah, it really is. Damn, I just want to be on that bus. Do you ever podcast from the bus? Do you ever go like on the road?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
You guys, stop, stop. I hope I've lived up to the seat on the couch. Can I do a podcast where I interview you guys? Because it's so weird to have so much attention on oneself and your whole life. You don't take a trip down memory road and look at your life very often.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
How could I hurt this little being? That's good to know because somebody told me recently that you should just go for the eyes. But I think instead I'll just give a big smile.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
So you can come here and get it out. Next time I'm going to make you guys walk through. I want to open up your roads.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I thought that was actually really helpful. I hadn't heard the eye thing before. That was new information to me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I really did. I think I had the last great American childhood except for your children. Okay. Because they have bus life and you're taking them into the national park system.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I love this. So do the motorcycles go on the bus?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Matilda, my daughter, grew up with electric vehicles.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I couldn't agree more. Real confidence based on doing things that are scary and knowing that you are capable and that you can trust yourself and that you have good judgment.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
We were clay pigeons shooting, but I didn't go hunting necessarily. But I went fishing and I had a lot of those experiences in nature of getting confidence through practical life skills that required some level of attention because of possibility for accident. Horses, skates. Skiing, motorcycles, fishing, all of these things are so important.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
I think of them as they're typically male, but they're most especially important for girls. Did you grow up with motorcycles? No, I didn't have any dirt bikes when I was growing up, but they were a part of my program for Matilda when she was growing up. Wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Yeah. So when I grew up in Montana, my big experience there was being on my great grandparents' farm. They had cattle, wheat, and horses. We lived in town where the grocery store was. Town in quotes. Yeah, town. And they lived more in the middle of the state and they lived on the farm in a much more rural environment. And that's where a lot of my exploring happened. But we were also skiers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
Mind you, do I ski now? No. Do I ride a dirt bike now? No. Do I fish? No. But I have all of those things inside of me. They really were formative in my ideas about who I could be. So that when you're sitting in class and you're next to some jerky guy who's trying to stick his finger in your nose, you're like, no, no, no, no, no. I know myself to be worth more than this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
That was my whole childhood. Every day was come back when you hear the dinner bell. And we were free to do whatever we wanted as long as we came home when we heard the dinner bell. And so it gave us so much time to meander and explore and go down these dirt roads and ride bikes and discover little things and find treasures and take them home and hide them and then...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
take them out in the middle of the night when they thought that we were sleeping and, you know, just getting into good trouble. And I miss it so much for my own children. I'm constantly thinking about how to create these experiences. But as you know, it's difficult. It requires a lot of infrastructure and undertaking if you live in an urban environment to try and get them out.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
You're starting acting. You have to start to storytell with the landscape too. What is that abandoned house? We shouldn't go in it. There's probably a witch. Yeah. Ooh, yeah. There's a witch that lives in that house. And then that becomes part of the play and part of the fantasy. But it just requires tremendous boredom, tremendous freedom, and a total lack of supervision.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
So how do you do that here, aside from getting out of here?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michelle Williams
The other thing that happens when you're in a natural environment is that you are learning so many lessons. You're in a receptive state, not a defensive state, because it's not your parent. It's not your teacher. It is... the thrill of your skin in the wind and the understanding that your survival depends on you and only you.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
Oh, that scene. I can understand why you would say that that was one of your most emotional moments with her because it's also, it mirrors, it's a kind of birth and to be held as a woman by the mother who held you as a baby, to be held by your best friend and have your body cared for. I can't imagine what that was like when it happened for real.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
Thank you for sharing that with us and sharing that moment from your lives and letting it be brought to a life of its own on film. I suppose what can be so great about what we get to do is that
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
it goes out into the world and you don't know how far and you don't know where it lands or with whom, but now this moment from your life, one of your most tender times with your best friend, of which you had so many, now becomes an access point for other people
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
to reflect on, to imagine, to have part of their own healing process, to give something like that of yourself away, to let it go, to give it some wings and trust that it's gonna land where it's needed. Such a beautiful act of generosity.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
And I was so honored to be brought into that room.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
Am I right? That's what you were going to say, right? Oh, no. I'm glad we both are on the same page about how terrible person he is.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
She's a wizard. She's an acting wizard. And I have no idea how he casts his spells and it's so frustrating and he won't tell me. I just love that guy. He is so sly and so dear and so warm and so, you know, I don't know what's better with Jay between action and cut or between cut and action. I honestly don't know where I would rather be with him.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
I'm like, I'd love to be your scene partner, but I also want this scene to be over so we can go back to hanging out. Totally.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
Because it is such a dance. Wow. Oh, I mean, we were just hanging on to each other for dear life because I had to give him a blowjob and I'd never given a fake blowjob on screen before. And he'd never received a fake blowjob on screen before. And so we were just we were both we had nerves about that for sure.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
And then when it was over, I was like, well, I guess this is what we'll always have like this weird memory, sir. Yeah. But it was okay. And we just trust fell into each other and have such camaraderie. And we just found our way. Acting is all about your response to the stimulus that's in front of you. And that's your scene partner. And so we have a responsibility to take care of each other.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
And I think that was the scene that afterwards we ate so much pizza. Yeah. As another way to take care of each other. There you go. Like stress ate a giant pie.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
Was there anything difficult? I mean, with Jay, you get the feeling like nothing's going to be difficult. There's going to be problems that you're going to need to solve. And each scene is its own story. entity with its own needs, wants, desires, and tricky turns. But with Jay, nothing's going to be difficult. It's going to be a pleasure to puzzle through it together.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
We need to find more crimes to commit with Jay.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
You know, the job brought together 120, 150 people working in their specific trades, doing what they do. But each and every one of those people was gathered around Molly's spirit. It's like a little bonfire was made. You know, this is our homage to her. That's Michelle Williams, who plays my brilliant friend Molly.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
I mean... When I heard that Rob was doing the show, I just thought, oh, this is next level. This is who's like bringing their ball and bat to the field and we're going to be tossing it around. Oh, boy. All right, Michelle, start preparing now. And as with Jay, Rob has complete control. and utter willingness to go to the known and then into the unknown.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
Everything you can imagine a scene might be and then abstract it and find yourself in a place you could not have predicted and you will find Rob there. Be it the emotional aspects or the comedic aspects, the man is spilling over with ideas, opportunities, offerings. Do you want to try this? Can I give you this? I'm open to doing this. How does that make you feel?
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
And you really have to be prepared because he can go anywhere and he can make very quick adjustments that change the shape of the game. And, oh, thank God it was Rob.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
Well, some of it is technical because when it comes time to kick him in the dick, I have a very precise target to hit. So I need to have my wits about me. One false move and we're in trouble. Exactly. So that helps keep one focused when one has a target to hit and it's between somebody's legs. And I think, you know, that scene in particular has so many sharp turns.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
And so it was kind of like you really had to learn the slope on that one. You're like, oh, I'm going fast. I'm going downhill. There's slaloms, there's trees, there's other skiers. I need to know this terrain.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
You know, we always had our scripts to work from. And then there was constant improvisation. When you're with Rob and Jenny, everybody's pitching a joke. So it was interesting.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
It was? Did you like it or was it a little like, oh? Oh, I loved it. I thought it was really fun because it mostly just happened after you felt like you had sort of completed the scene to the best of your abilities. Then they come in with the alternates. So it just kind of feels like throwing a party at the end of the show. That's fun. That's really fun.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
Yeah, right? That you can rewrite some endings sometimes and that some aspect of her was being fulfilled in another realm. You know, this is like an imaginative... This is an imagination realm too, and I'm glad that we could give that to her, but you certainly gave her enough love for more than one lifetime.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
I'm too young, and it sucks, okay? I haven't done anything with my life. I actually don't know what I like or what I want. I've never even had an orgasm with another person. And now I'm gonna die.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
I think it's so glorious when you can find a piece of material that offers up so much to play with and that it isn't one thing or a straight line. It's very exciting to play with so many colors. Yeah.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
I mean, the thing that I always think about is just how, in the way that you guys would recount her experiences, just there's total lack of judgment. And that's what we need more of. And, like, I would like to preach the gospel of Molly, which is, why waste your time judging people? Yeah. Yeah. That's not befitting an only life. You know what I was wondering today? What?
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
Were people, like, in your friend circle... When Molly announces, hey guys, this is how I'm going to live through the end and I'm going to go on a sexual journey to find myself. How did people react? Were they shocked? Did they judge? Were they gossipy? Did she have to deal with like ramifications of how people thought she was behaving? Yeah.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
I just loved the tone that you guys found of recounting what she was experiencing and going through, but with no shame and no guilt and no negativity, just pure, loving observation that was tuned into the humanity and the hilarity, but full of love. Yeah. Oh, you just sounded like her. Oh my Let's have some Molly dreams tonight, shall we?
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
You already did by sharing so much with us, the podcast, this experience that we just got to have together doing the podcast, fan, fangirl dream come true for me. And, you know, the love and the cracking wide open. That's the example that you set and we're following in both of your lead.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
back to where it all began nikki i know i was just gonna say that this is so like full circle right it's so amazing um you know because i've been talking about the podcast and how i fell in love with it how hard i fell for it and so on this day when i've been remembering it and thinking about it so much so that'd be brought back together to be on the podcast um is very moving um
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
Likewise. Stop. I'm going to cry. Because I think, you know, our show owes everything to the podcast. And then it also deviates in some of its storytelling and in some of the ways that it elaborates. But really what it is, is like we're gathered around the spirit that the two of you created on the podcast. And And Molly's spirit that's no longer with us.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
So she gets brought back to life in these moments when we can talk about her and say, yeah, she was like this. And these are the lessons that I take away from her. And then to also start to hear about people having their own experiences of watching it and what they take away from the spirit of you two together and Molly's spirit.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
It came to me, just kind of landed in my email inbox. This is the show that Liz is writing and producing and it's based on a podcast. And here's one episode and a link to the podcast. And I read the episode and I thought, is that as good as I think it is? And I went back and read it a second time and I said, yes, it is. And then I linked to the podcast.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
and listened to it in its totality and was sobbing uncontrollably at the end and I couldn't communicate why to my husband. And so I thought, gosh, this thing really has a hold of me. I'm having such a strong response and such an emotional response. And that doesn't really happen to me so often anymore. And couldn't say why. So then it really had its hook in me because it was emotional.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
It was mysterious. It was compelling. It was funny. I was in love with you guys. I was devastated that she was gone. What was it about?
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
So many things. So many things. Well, I think one, the unsung song of deep female friendship, which is to say it's a love affair. It may not be sexual. It isn't sexual by nature of it being a friendship, but it is a deep, passionate love affair. And that's how I feel about my closest female friends. And I haven't seen that kind of...
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
intense love between women, or I just don't see it enough, but I know I experience it in my own life. So I was so moved by how you guys represented that, how you lived that, how you are that. And then for me, her choice to live all the way to the end so bravely.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
I was saying today to somebody that it's like when you're playing with a child and they build this big, beautiful structure of Legos or magnetiles or whatever, And the way they deconstruct it isn't piece by piece. They obliterate it. They use their arm like a wrecking ball and the whole thing comes crashing down.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
And I was thinking about how when Molly got her diagnosis, that's what she did to her life. The structure of a marriage, the structure of society, the structure of... rules or human sexuality or what's acceptable. She just took a wrecking ball to it and said, this is not what I want with the time that I have left.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
And the bravery of that, you know, the job brought together 120, 150 people to a place of employment, working in their specific trades, doing what they do. But each and every one of those people was gathered around Molly's spirit. I know. It's like a little bonfire was made. You know, this is our homage to her. This is our tribute.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
No, not for me. I am a leap and then look kind of person. Yes. I've come to discover this about myself because when I fall in love, when I have an overwhelming response to a piece of material or a person or a place, I just start running. Right. Towards it. Right. Not away. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
I will be that for you for the rest of time. Okay. Thank you. That's such a beautiful thing to say. Thank you. Where did that come from? Like, there were things you wouldn't have ever known that you were doing. Like, what happened? I told her that I was completely available to seeing her in my dreams. I...
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
I think that when you're working on something, I think that life does kind of take on a sort of a mystical quality. And I am open to the energy of that person finding its way to me in whatever form, flickering, transmission, idea, song. I am here for it.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
Right. Because it's the person that you would drop everything for and they know it. You know, the chemistry with Jenny was just so easy from day one. It was like a conversation with no beginning and no end. And it continues to feel like that. Yeah.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
And I think we also bring to it the experience with our own best friendships, this enduring love that we share with our own best friends that has seen us through decades. And just the deep understanding of what that means to have that in your life and to be that for somebody else. And the feeling that you wouldn't have survived without them.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
Do you remember that moment where it clicked for you and Jenny? Yeah, I remember on that day that we did the chemistry read. We were wearing the same outfit, accidentally, of course, but we had just chosen to... Wait, are you kidding me? Yeah, we were dressed... We looked like the cover of a 70s record album, like... All black with cowboy boots and a shearling jacket. And I was like, oh, hello.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
Hello, twin. Hello. I guess we're already on the same brainwaves. But it was magical.
Dying For Sex
Michelle Williams: On Becoming Molly | 8
Well, because she's Sissy Spacek. I know. And she brings with her so much. So much lived experience as a person, a mother, an artist. So much enthusiasm and joy in doing what we do. And as with Jenny, immediately when I met Sissy... I thought she's my mom or we feel relational to each other. I feel as though I could be from her.
Fresh Air
Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Well, that was the period of time in my life when there were sort of multiple people going in and out of that house. Like I referenced my friend Daphne. We shared a bedroom and a closet and a bathroom. And then Jeremy was there. My sister was there. We had a name. I think maybe Jeremy came up with it. And he called it Fort Awesome.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And it was like Pippi Longstocking or something, something what you imagine as a child, you know, you imagine this place where you could go and you could make some of the rules and you would be together and there would be, it would be full of fun and play and ideas and personalities and acceptance and love and
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
He had sort of imagined this place as a child that he, his child mind, would call Fort Awesome. And he said, I think that was kind of like what that time was. It was like Fort Awesome.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
I'm too young, and it sucks, okay? I haven't done anything with my life. I actually don't know what I like or what I want. I've never even had an orgasm with another person.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Exactly. Um, that was, that's my friend. That's who I've known for a long time. That's who I know now and raise my children with great proximity to his children. But that at the heart of what he does and who he is that maybe you don't get to witness if you don't know him in the way that I do is this delight in play. So he would be engaged for as long as Matilda was.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
wanted to be on fairy princesses or tea parties or dress up. So I think I was trying to communicate that there's another aspect to this person, this friend of mine who I love so much, and to shine a little light on that.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
He took play, yes, exactly, exactly. You know, I think also when you're trying to make something out of nothing, which is the place where I met Jeremy. We met at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. We were both very young people How old were you guys? Oh, gosh, maybe 23 or so without real, you know, access to an interior of a life in the theater or in cinema. We were
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
We were wanting and striving, and that is hard and takes a lot of effort and also a lot of doggedness to keep at it. And I think sometimes that looks desperate or ungainly or… But we were working. And I think it's really inspiring to see the way that he's held on to that work ethic, even though he has now such great success and so many accolades.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
He's still working, like banging on that door, just like when we were young. And I really admire that.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Well, something that happened to me when I was making that show is that I met Mary Beth Peel, who played my Grams. And Mary Beth Peel is an esteemed, beloved New York stage actress. And she showed me plays. And then I started going up to New York City. I would get in my car in North Carolina and I would drive 12 hours for the weekend. By yourself? By myself.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
I would go see a movie and a play and walk this little stretch of 6th Avenue and then I would get in my car and drive 12 hours home. And what I started seeing when I got to New York City were ideas of things that I would like to be a part of. And then I had this woman come And Mary Beth, who was encouraging me and saying that I should try and that she thought that I could.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And that was at a time when nobody had ever said anything like that to me before, that I could be in movies or I could be in plays or I could make things that mattered to me. I had come from a very different environment. I'd been working on and off as an actor in Los Angeles. I'd been working since I was 12.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
I was emancipated at 15 and living on my own for about, I don't know, half a year or something before I got Dawson's Creek. And so I was coming from... Los Angeles and this sort of idea of, you know, if you can get a national commercial, it'll last you a year. And that's what I wanted for myself. If you could get on a TV show, you could support yourself. And that's what I wanted for myself.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And then I went to New York City and I thought I was introduced to this whole other expression of the medium that I'd never been exposed to. I think growing up, I'd just seen The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins and things like that. I didn't really know what was possible. And then I started to make New York City home.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
I did my first play there when I was 18, and it became the place that I would spend the summers and the weekends and just kind of a place that I thought, oh, I could make a life for myself here.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
It was really just something that was in the air at the time. It wasn't because I... had some abiding passion or some noticeable talent at this thing. It was just something that other kids were doing. We were living in San Diego at that time, and so my parents and I would come up for these auditions, but they were for commercials and infomercials and 10-second spots, 30-second spots.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
They were cattle calls. I don't know if they still call them that. I hope they don't. That was my concept of acting.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
I am constantly confronted by the things that I don't know. And Like what? Real gaps where information should be. Geography. Okay, yeah. I could go on and on. But I think maybe that's why work has become, you know, that's my conduit to the world. That's my, this is the thing that I've spent the most time trying to gain an understanding of and why it was so important to me because
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Without it, I really had nothing to show for myself. I had no institution behind me that said, I accredit you in this particular way. And so then where do you get a good feeling about yourself? So my work has meant so much to me because it's been, it was where I got to know myself.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And I thought, well, maybe if I could get a little bit good at this thing, I could get a little bit of that self-esteem.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Yeah, I really burned for this one. I wanted this job so badly. I had read this script and made my case for it and my pleas to the director. And we went on walks and we exchanged books and music and other things that we related through this piece of material. And I was just on fire to make this thing for two, three, four, five, six years. It was just all I could see was making this movie.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And then the process of making the movie was such a throwback to how I had read that people used to work and what an experience that was. You know, never before, never again. We had these immense rehearsal periods where we were not working on the specific scenes or the specific dialogue, but we were building a memory bank together. and building experiences as these characters.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
He would have us do these family tasks like do a budget. Now decorate a Christmas tree. Okay. Now take your daughter to an amusement park. Now get into a fight about why the sink isn't fixed. So we were creating a shared experience. Because it's going into our bodies and our psyches, we're experiencing it as though it has happened to our characters.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And so then when it came time to shoot the second half of the film, when they are older and cleaving from each other, We had the built-up frustration of trying to make something work and failing at it.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Yeah, I haven't revisited this film for so long. And it just makes me think, you know, there was a point in my life where I had lived more on screen than off, when I had more experiences as a character than as a person. And so I think that work, characters, they became places where I could try to work out what's the truth of the situation, what's the truth between these two people.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And that maybe if I could learn that through these sort of avatars. that I could take that into my personal relationships, that that would sort of teach me how to live, teach me how to be.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Because what I saw when I started seeing these movies, these films, these TV shows, is that I saw so many different representations of how a human being can be and still be lovable and still be worthwhile and still have value. And I thought, oh, this is different than from what life is telling me or let's say patriarchy is telling me.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
I'm really thrilled to be here with you.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And so I think that all of cinema and all of art maybe is compassion. And if I can become a part of this compassionate universe where characters are allowed to make mistakes and still be lovable, maybe I can build a compassionate future for myself where I can make mistakes and be lovable.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
I mean, I think they sort of go hand in hand, and you just keep... You keep growing as a person and then you put that into your work and then your work grows you in another direction and you take that back into your personhood. And I think that's why this can be truly a healing experience.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Like I think of playing, like when I played Steven Spielberg's mother, I think about her aura and her zest for to make the ordinary moments a little something extra to hang on to. Her appreciation, her love. Her lustiness for the mountains, for the desert, for color, for her lipstick, for her children, for her lover, for everything. I think about that.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Oh, I would love to be I would love to bring that aspect out in myself so that my children experience that from their mom.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Yeah, it was, boy oh boy, I was 30 when I made that movie, and that was just the hardest thing I'd ever done. I think I cried every morning and every night. Why was it the hardest thing? Because I'd never tried anything so audacious, and I'd never tried anything that was so far from my idea of myself. And... I don't know how I was crazy enough to say yes to that.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Because I had zero evidence that it was something that I would be capable of. But again, I have this drive and maybe it is because... I lack formal education. I have this real need to learn new things. And so when I looked at that role, I just thought, well, there's a lot of learning there. And I was right because it landed me in London and it landed me with these master teachers.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And so it gave me this kind of crash course to a way of working that I hadn't experienced before, this physical reinvention. to have to learn how to completely remake my own body with my own habits and propensities and holdings, to let go of those and to allow a new structure to emerge that was more similar to Marilynne. And that was very painful.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
It was like breaking me down bone by bone and then building me back up. What kind of stuff did you have to do? I mean, because you have to mentally get there, but physically get there too, right? but you have a start date for a movie that's telling you at a certain point you have to drop your pencil and you have to just be ready.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
It unraveled me. And I went back to listen to it for a second time to try and figure out why it had this power over me. And then there I was on the floor again with no sense of what had really just happened. And I listened to the podcast in tandem with reading the first, the pilot episode written by Liz Merriweather and Kim Rosenstock.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
But, you know, her walk, her carriage with those shoulders that looked like water was falling off of them, and, you know, as you can see me hunched over in front of you, that's not my resting state. But I was very lucky to be supported by a few teachers on that film who I think really set me off on a new path of...
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Yes, there's all this interior landscape because as I was growing up, I was reading all these books about the method and Uta Hagen and this kind of more American way of working from the inside out. And then I was introduced to this perhaps more British way of working from the outside in. And so I was compelled by what I was learning there and realizing –
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
how many more opportunities it would give me to become different people if I could deconstruct myself and then reconstruct in somebody else's image.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
I see this as an acknowledgement of what is possible when a woman is trusted to discern her own needs, feels safe enough to voice them, and respected enough that they'll be heard. When I asked for more dance classes, I heard yes. More voice lessons, yes. A different wig, a pair of fake teeth not made out of rubber, yes.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And all of these things, they require effort and they cost more money, but my bosses never presumed to know better than I did about what I needed in order to do my job and honor Gwen Verdon. And so I want to say thank you so much to FX and to Fox 21 Studios for supporting me completely and for paying me equally because they understood...
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Because they understood that when you put value into a person, it empowers that person to get in touch with their own inherent value. And then where do they put that value? They put it into their work. And so the next time a woman, and especially a woman of color, because she stands to make 52 cents on the dollar compared to her white male counterpart...
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Tells you what she needs in order to do her job. Listen to her. Believe her. Because one day she might stand in front of you and say thank you for allowing her to succeed because of her workplace environment and not in spite of it. Thank you.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
I spent a long time working on it. I knew if given the opportunity, I knew what I wanted to say, and that you have a very short time to say it, and so it needs to be as perfect as you can make it. And then underneath... My hands are like this. My heart is like this. And I was pregnant at the time. And so, you know, also experiencing that.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
But I felt so connected in that moment to have had these experiences that allowed me to be the conduit for the message.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
We're not where I thought we would be. The opportunities of those moments of the Me Too movement, of the Black Lives Matter movement, I hope that they are underground and that they will come back and that there will be a resurgence of the optimism and the momentum that we were enjoying.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And those companion pieces for me cast such a spell that I immediately, for reasons that I couldn't understand and were beyond me, knew that I wanted to make this. And went to my husband and said, well, you need to take a look at this because this is going to be in our life now.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Right. Get it. It belongs to you. And that humor is not a way to... make a joke in a sad situation, that humor is a way to make something whole and complete and also a way to remember something better. We don't want to remember the sad times. We want to remember the good times, the happy times.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And so if you can find the, there's a line from a poet that I like, the light underbelly of the dark, dark beast, you will be able to
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
transport yourself back to those moments and relive them and be there with them so the reclamation of humor especially in or the acknowledgement or the the insistence on looking for it on finding it because it's there it just needs to be found so the insistence on continuing to find the humor but most of all the pleasure because they can't take that away from us
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
I think it's a lot of things, but if I could put one pin in it, it would be that it's possible to be both scared and brave at the same time. And that's what I think moved me so much about Molly's journey and this best friendship.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Yeah, it was like when you were a kid, you know, and you would call your best friend and say, what are we doing? You know, the black t-shirt and the white shorts. And that's how we showed up. I knew that we would part and come back together. You know, we had this reading, this moment, but already the connection was made and we We knew that we would go down this road together.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And the sweet, very sweet ending to the story is she's moving to Brooklyn where I live and Liz lives.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Yeah, we're hitching our wagons together.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
I'm thinking of all the friends that I've lived with in what really felt like a commune for a while. There was a period of my life where we had room to share, and my friends came to make our house feel like a home. One of my best friends, Daphne, we slept in the same bed for years, and another friend, Jeremy, lived downstairs, and then their friends would be there.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
It was kind of like a real open-door policy to create a sense of community. And those have been the sustaining relationships in my life that have taken me to this place where now I have a growing family and a husband. But it's those friendships that have sort of created a support. And we share this memory of this time together when we all lived under one roof.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
So the thing that I'm always looking for, and I think the reason that I go to work, is to expand my sense of freedom. And that the moments between action and cut, that is a very safe space. Because nothing bad can truly happen there. The worst that can happen to me is that I feel embarrassed. But that's not going to destroy me, nor is it going to stop me.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
So I have to continue to tell myself that that is my problem. Time to get free. And that's kind of my mantra. Get free, get free, get free. And so I return again to that idea of it is possible to be both scared and brave at the same time. So I had to tell myself that a lot before those scenes and really hold on to this idea of relaxation, expansion, recovery.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
I think it's an idea that's been dawning for a while and a place that I've come to think I can have real pleasure. And I think some of it is based in the way that I grew up. I had this section of my childhood where I lived in Montana and there was... So much spaciousness and so much liberation and so much freedom and so much trust. What did that look like?
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
It was a place where a child could be unattended to and still have the parents feel like the child was safe because the child was in nature. in a field, on a dirt road, in a big backyard. And so it allowed for this kind of exploration.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And recently it's kind of dawned on me, oh, I think that's the thing that I would relate it to most in my life, is this feeling that I had of a child sort of following my own hands and feet to a place that I didn't know anything about, but there might be a discovery to be made there. And I think...
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Those two experiences, how I feel about my work and how I felt about my early childhood, are related to each other.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Well, they also had a real open-door policy. They were Democrats, and so they would take in travelers. I remember a summer that we took in a family, and they had children our age.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And we played together and we would lay down a blanket in the middle of the living room and it would become a stage and we would put on this show that we had been working on while our parents were busy doing things that parents do, cooking and cleaning and tasks and chores. And we were free to do what we wanted with our time.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And that would be looking for arrowheads or snakeskins or riding horses. But really, our parents and grandparents believed that nature was a safe place for us. And so that was our playground. And I think about this as it relates to my own children, because I think nature was really my first teacher. And nature is impartial. It doesn't care about you.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And it doesn't care about good or bad or right or wrong. It cares about safety and danger. And so these lessons were not heavy handed. And, you know, I think about it as with my own children, because the landscape has changed so much. And will they have those experiences?
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
Same, same. The consideration of one's own pleasure was not in the conversation when I was coming of age. It was, listen, first of all, you shouldn't do it. Yeah, right. If you have to, you'll probably suffer a tragedy, get sick, or die. Right, right. So it seemed pretty scary and loaded. And it's certainly taken me a long time to unpack.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And I just, I do believe that things will be different for my daughter. Oh, say more. What do you mean? I see her generation and their radical acceptance of each other and themselves. And I see, I see them working together with more equality than certainly what I was raised with. Look, I hope I'm not just talking about Brooklyn.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
That's what I think. I just think, oh, she's just light years ahead of where I maybe even am. She teaches me.
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
she is proud of me and accepting of me and even this show she's like you go mom or like I did a magazine cover that was racy and she said you look amazing and so I don't know if it's cultural I don't know if it's familial I don't know if it's title I don't know if it's but I'm seeing a rapid push and developmental readiness as it relates to my daughter
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Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
I think maybe the first time that it happened was when I was on Blue Valentine, and it was meant to be set in California, and I'd been attached to it for so many years, and it was my heart and my passion and my everything, my reason for being. And they said, guess what? We are ready to go. Come on to California.
Fresh Air
Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
And it totally broke my heart, but I didn't feel like I was in a position in that moment to relocate my daughter and myself. And they said, I have to let this go. This is not going to be good for the health of her family. And so I was lucky enough to meet a collaborator, Derek C. in France, who said, OK, then we'll take what was set by the ocean and set it by the mountains.
Fresh Air
Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
So I've been lucky enough to come across collaborators who would make that accommodation and then also just find other ways to accommodate. Can we do it during the summer so that it's not disruptive of her school pattern or whatever? Is it a place that will allow for some incredible opportunity for her?
Fresh Air
Michelle Williams Insists On Finding Pleasure & Humor Alongside Pain
So it's sort of a give and a take and just always kind of checking in with that maternal instinct.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Because you didn't go to formal school, of course, now you've lived the school of life like 10 times over, right? But do you feel any insecurity about that? Or does that ever come up for you where you're thinking about like, this is a bit of knowledge that maybe if I had gone to school, I would have known it? Oh, all the time.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I want to ask you about a really big moment in 2019, your Emmy Award speech when you won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series for Fosse-Verdon. I want to play a little bit of it and then we'll talk about it briefly on the other side. Let's listen.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
That was my guest, Michelle Williams, in 2019. I still get chills when I hear it. You were so profound and clear-eyed. I always wondered, do you practice the speech before you go up there? Because that's such a detailed speech. Thank you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Sometimes a show reaches out and grabs you by the collar with its honesty. That's what happened after I watched the first episode of the new FX series Dying for Sex. I knew immediately that I had to watch the rest of it alone.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
are you feeling in this moment as someone who you like spent your career really trying to show the inner like us as women like you're trying to show the totality of us as human beings and now we're in 2025 you're finding so much in your daughter matilda but then there's so much in the world that we're up against now five years later how are you six years later what are you reflecting on when you hear that speech
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Are you feeling optimistic? No, are you? I'm thinking about what you said about your daughter. I feel optimism when I look at my kids.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Yeah. I feel optimistic when I watch shows like Dying for Sex, which was hugely meaningful to me. And you said, like, you take a piece of every project and character and you grow with it and it goes to the next thing for you. What are you taking away from dying for sex? Pleasure, baby, pleasure.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I needed to sit with it, to cry without feeling self-conscious, to laugh without an audience, because the show is so intimate, so distinctly human. Adapted from the Wondery podcast of the same name and based on a true story, Dying for Sex follows a woman named Molly, played by my guest today, Michelle Williams.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Man, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being here. German-born writer Daniel Kelman was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020 for his novel Till. His latest novel, The Director, is set largely in Nazi Germany and raises questions about art and collaboration. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has this review.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Molly leaves her marriage after a terminal breast cancer diagnosis and embarks on a sexual adventure. But that doesn't even scratch the surface. Yes, there is sex, sometimes kinky, a little awkward, often hilarious. But the show is really about everything surrounding it. It's about what happens when the fear of dying outweighs the fear of never having truly lived.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed The Director by Daniel Kelman. Coming up, we hear from actress Sarah Snook. She played Shiv Roy in Succession and was just nominated for a Tony for her role in The Picture of Dorian Gray. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Our next guest is Sarah Snook.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
She's best known for playing Shiv Roy on the show Succession. Now she's on Broadway in a one-person show, an adaptation of the Oscar Wilde story The Picture of Dorian Gray. Last week, she received a Tony nomination for Best Leading Actress in a Play. She spoke with Fresh Air's Anne-Marie Baldonado.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
It's about how trauma gets stored in the female body. It's about reclaiming pleasure, even after we've been told that it doesn't belong to us. In this scene that I'm about to play, Molly has just learned that her breast cancer has returned and is now stage four. She begins meeting with a palliative care counselor for support.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, Michelle Williams talks about starring in Dying for Sex, a dark but funny series based on a true story about a woman with stage four cancer who, facing death, decides to take ownership of her sexual pleasure. It's something Williams says she herself didn't really consider until recently.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Dying for Sex is also a story about friendship. Jenny Slate plays Nikki, Molly's best friend, who becomes her caretaker after Molly leaves her loving but emotionally unavailable husband. And at times, their friendship feels like the real love story. And did I mention that this is a comedy?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Michelle Williams has spent her career exploring the complexities and inner lives of women, from her breakout role as Jen Lindley on Dawson's Creek to Gwen Verdon in Fosse Verdon and the role of Mitzi, Steven Spielberg's mother in The Fablemans. She's been nominated five times for an Academy Award and has won two Golden Globes and took home an Emmy for her performance in Fosse Verdon.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
A warning for those who might have children in the room. We will be talking about sex and pleasure during this conversation. Michelle Williams, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really thrilled to be here with you. I am thrilled to have you. You heard me say I needed to watch this series alone.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Nice to chat. Sarah Snook spoke with Anne-Marie Baldonado. Snook recently received a Tony nomination for her leading role in the stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray on Broadway, where she plays all 26 characters. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
The wonderful thing about this job is we get previews and we kind of watch it together, kind of like a date night, you know. And after that first episode, I said, I have to watch it alone. I watched the whole series by myself. And then, of course, I went to him sobbing, telling him all about it. And I heard you had a similar experience after listening to the podcast that this is based on. I did.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Have you come to understand the core of that emotion, where that kind of like magical thing came from within you that knew this was something you had to do?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Yes, this is definitely a series about friendship. Almost how like our female friendships, we can have soulmates with each other. You know, we often think of that in the romantic context. Jenny Slate played your best friend and what chemistry you guys had. I actually heard something like that. I think the test read that you all did, you came, you arrived in the same outfit or something like that?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Wait, you mean Jenny Slate? Jenny Slate. So in real life, right? You all became friends in real life.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
You seem to be someone who really values friendship, almost in a way that is kind of communal. I've heard you just talk throughout your career about the friends that you've collected over time that have become kind of like your family. That's very true.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I want to talk a little bit more about friendship, but I want to talk about sex for a minute, okay? Sex is a proxy for so many things, although sex in this series is kind of spoken about in a literal sense and, like, the things that you want to do before you pass. One of the things I think I heard you say is, like, I have never had to do on screen, like, perform self-pleasure. Right.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I wanted to ask you about that because that act is so intimate. We do it without being self-conscious because we're often alone. And here you are in front of an entire crew, right? I can imagine. What was it like and how were you able to get to that truth for yourself in those moments when you had to act out those scenes?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
One of the other things I was thinking about is, you know, when I was coming of age, of course we know, like, sex is for everyone as a consenting adult. But really, the message that you're told as a woman is that sex is for men and that you're performing for them. This series actually made me kind of think about that in new ways at this old age that I hadn't thought about. What about for you?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Also, we hear from Sarah Snook. She's best known for her role on HBO's Succession as Shiv Roy. Snook was recently nominated for a Tony for her performance on Broadway and the stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
When you're talking about Brooklyn, where you guys live. No, I think I know what you mean because I have an 18-year-old daughter. And every time I listen to she and her friends, I think like, wow. I mean, they're just so far and beyond where I was at that age. That's what I think.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Thinking back to something you were saying about friendship and that communal connection that you've been able to foster and feel with friends, your eldest daughter, Matilda's dad, is the late Heath Ledger. And you've spoken so beautifully about your friend and award-winning actor, Jeremy Strong. Yes.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
How he was such a strong presence in your life after Heath's death, almost like he moved in quite literally and became what you needed in that moment. Can you share what it meant to have a friend like that during such a profound time in your life?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
What did that look like? Because I think you said, like, you described Jeremy as serious enough to hold the weight of a child's broken heart, which is so powerful, and sensitive enough to approach her through play.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Our guest today is award-winning actor Michelle Williams, star of the FX series Dying for Sex. We'll hear more of our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Let's go back to the Dawson's Creek days, okay? So your breakout role was as Jen Lindley. She's this rebellious girl from New York City who goes to Capeside to live with her conservative grandmother.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
You were 16 years old, right, when the series started? I was, yes, 16. Yes. It just sounds like it was a big moment for you in understanding who you are and your taste. What was it about that experience that kind of was that flashpoint for you?
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And my being in a male room was grounds for punishment. And so he definitely, you know, chewed us out. And then he said, well, I'm going to let you off this time because I see you running all the time. I was like, well, okay. And so that kind of thing was in my mind when I was tired and wanted to take a day off.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
It was like, well, my reputation, my entire sense of selfhood really revolves around being the endurance runner. So as long as I'm doing that, I don't know, like I'm doing something to claim my place within the Marine Corps, no matter how tiny it is. It makes me feel like I'm doing my best.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
All of it. I enlisted one of the greatest appeals of the military was the promise of meritocracy, that I would be judged on my character and my effort, what I could control. And not my gender, which is something that no one gets to control. It's just how you are. And that was just simply not the experience I had. My gender was so aggressively I was sexualized from the first day.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And that never really ended until the last day I left the Marine Corps. Like if someone managed to say something. reminding me I was a girl and that that was inherently problematic effectively every day of my enlistment. There were times as I worked on this book for nine years where I really hoped that some of the messaging had become irrelevant.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
I am fortunate enough that many of my girlfriends who've chosen to have children and have the young women that I do see in my life have so much more empowered messages of what it is to be a girl. They're proud of their strength. They're here for it. They stand up for themselves. And it's so cool to see
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And I kind of had this hope that maybe this work and some of the things I'm talking about of the casual sexual harassment and misogyny, maybe this is the last generation. Maybe this is going to You know, be more of a historical reflection of a certain point of time. And since the recent election, I kind of have felt this really familiar fire under my skin.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Trump's nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is saying that women are incompetent and that their presence in the military causes love triangles and drama. And the conversation about women in combat is a really charged one. And it distracts from the fact that ostensible leaders saying that kind of dismissive, reductionistic language is going to seep down through the ranks.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And it is going to affect women like me who are nowhere near combat but are still going to be hearing this language of inherently your value within the Marine Corps, your value within the military is less than a man's. Because you are not as mission critical. Where it really matters, where push really comes to shove, that's not you. It's me.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And that kind of othering dismissed the heck out of the contributions of women who have been leaders in the military and who have been smashing all these barriers as long as they've been in.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Boot Marines became fluent in how we spoke of him. We would often speak of him. Everything the Marine Corps does is for the Lance Corporal on the front lines with his rifle, we echoed, a mantra training our attention outward to our brothers overseas. Everything we did was for the infantrymen, always the infantryman. Infantry was exclusively men.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
The pinnacle of actual Marines in the actual war meant forever and always he. You, Marine, are learning a language to support him. When you are tired or Arabic irregular verbs make no sense, you need motivation. You need to remember him. You do not have it as bad as him here in cushy Monterey, California. And so you can run another mile or stay up an hour later. Marines also spoke of her, too.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
A warning. She was a phantom, the female Marine accepted as the standard, an allegory. She was an overweight, non-deployed corporal. She spent half her life on chit nursing some made-up injury. That she was sexually repugnant yet slept with everyone, which would mean everyone slept with her also, no, confused me deeply. Males had their standard to prove, be like him.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Females had our standard to prove, don't be like her.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
I think there were a lot of people who had their heart in the right place. There were a lot of Marines who did have kindness to them. I think also very, very few, I can think of so few examples when someone was saying, you know, it was always joking, right? It was always intended. Well, I actually don't know the intention, but it was always portrayed as, oh, we're just joking.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Williams just takes things too seriously. She's just too sensitive, you know, like females are, that kind of thing. Very rare would someone say, hey, maybe we shouldn't talk about our colleagues that way. Or like, hey, not only do we work together, we all live together. There is no separation between our professional and personal lives.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And maybe we don't need to be sitting here and speculating about our colleagues' sexual lives while they're right there. And I don't think I ever heard anybody, and part of it is a maturity thing. We speak so much about like men and women in the military. I enlisted the week of my 18th birthday. A lot of us were under 21. I think our leadership who we looked for to mitigate some of our
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Scuffles were like 23, 24, 25. Like we were kids and didn't necessarily have the mentorship or maturity that maybe should have corrected some of the behavior that we had.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And it's another one of those things where with retrospect, it's like, wow, that was really childish. But I was 18 and I just left the Mormon church. I had no idea when to push back and say like, hey, that's inappropriate, knock it off. Never said that ever. I, again, believed in this kind of inherent superiority in men. And if that's how they saw it, then it must be so.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And thank God, not every woman who serves had my background and my kind of training and subservience. But nor do I think that was an entirely unique thing either, where I think many girls and women are conditioned to make allowances for the boys and men around them.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
The language was... Yeah, absolutely. You know, maybe you shouldn't be a Marine because you can't hack it. So first I was conditioned to understand that, you know, basically anything I heard, the appropriate or the thing to do that would best convey that I wanted to be on this team was silence. So it starts there.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And then there's the casual touching, like the men who just like find an excuse to stand behind me and put their hands around my waist or who would move me physically with their hands, just joking. Yeah. Just joking. Never mind that it was in the barracks where I lived. Never mind that I had an eating disorder. And never mind that I wasn't consenting. You know, you're a woman among men.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
There's a significant overlap in values that you'll see in someone who's committed to an eating disorder and someone who's committed to being a good Marine. A level of competition, a level of bodily self-denial, and the belief that self-mastery comes in the form of physical prowess. I think everyone's experience of an eating disorder is unique.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Again, why are you making a big deal out of this? So then that's the second level of conditioning. And then you learn to not believe other women. That, you know, the first platoon I was in, there were women who had had a sexual violation. I don't know the details fully, but I do know that the perpetrators were back in our platoon.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
They'd been to some, you know, slap on the wrist, some degree of being removed, and then they were back. And I learned to question when women said, you know, this thing happened to me because I was hearing, well, what were you wearing? Had you been drinking? Were you supposed to be there? What did you expect?
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And that kind of horrible, just heinous victim-blaming language I feel was very prevalent. So now you are isolated from feeling like you can speak up for yourself. You are disconnected from other women who could be your allies, but you're trying to be like the guys by distrusting them.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
you've kind of normalized that men will sometimes touch you in a way that you don't love, but like you don't want to make a big deal out of it because you don't want to complain. And then, you know, when I was sexually assaulted, I was like this great numbness because there was kind of a sense of, I knew this was going to happen.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And it's hard to explain that, but it was like all of the quieting of the lesser evils made the greater evil It allowed it to happen in silence. There was nothing to say at that point, I felt. Of course, that's not every woman's experience. Again, there are women who fight very, very hard for justice. But in my experience, it was just like almost inevitable.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
I at no point seriously considered reporting that assault in part because I lacked the language to name it and secondly because I knew it wouldn't be taken seriously or at least I felt that it would not be taken seriously. I saw and heard for years how we spoke about women who did report sexual assault and And I knew that it would somehow be my fault. I was there, wasn't I?
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
I hadn't been drinking, but I was there. And I knew that people would – I knew I was perceived as a kind or a nice person because I was so eager to please. And I suspected that it would be like, oh, you know, William, he's an idiot. He probably thought she was leading him on and he probably thought she was interested, but you can't really blame him for that, you know. And I just –
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
so absolutely anticipated that the response would be, but did he really? You know, the fact of the matter is that, to say it simply, you know, that really hurt my feelings. Like it was violating and painful and sad. And it was like I don't want to expose this to scrutiny and to doubt. That was just how we spoke about – gosh, I wish that wasn't true.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
I think we're all a confluence of a lot of different factors. But I do feel that some of the rhetoric that goes into the Marine culture, especially in recruiting, might even appeal to people who have certain grand desires of themselves and the really embodied sensation of wanting to be good and wanting to succeed and wanting to challenge themselves.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And I would love to believe that that's changed or is changing. But I can definitely speak to my own experience in feeling like there was never – For not a second did I consider reporting because I knew it wouldn't be taken seriously. And if it was taken seriously, it was going to be my life that got harder and not his.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
I think the kindest among them, yes, very legitimately wanted to be good leaders, wanted to take care of me. I did feel that sense of People did care about me as a person, some people. However, there was just a complete confusion over what an eating disorder was and a complete skepticism of its severity. There was also a remarkable lack of holistic care.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
So I would go to medical for all the different components of having an eating disorder, you know, the ulcers and the blood and the Raynaud's and the anemia and like all these different things. But at no point was there a comprehensive continuity of care of anyone saying, you know, all these things together, these are all indications that this person is really struggling with an eating disorder.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
So I went to a nutritionist who asked me what I eat in a day and I described my day, which included about 900 calories, which is starvation levels of food. I described that and she goes, oh, that sounds great. Oh, you eat so clean. You eat so well. And that that kind of. rhetoric around good and bad food.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And she told me most of her clients were on BCP, indicating most of her clients were people who were overweight or prescribed to be overweight by the military standards. And then she was helping them lose weight. So she's like, but you won't have to worry about that if you eat like this. You eat even better than I do.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And so, yeah, I diagnosed her as a fellow orthorexic, which is a part of my eating disorder was this kind of obsession with eating well. And eating clean is another way you hear that a lot. And for me, it extended to every bite of food I ate. Did this harm anyone? Did this harm the planet? I was, you know, vegan for a lot of my time in the military.
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And those values make really good Marines and pretty – saw the chances of developing an eating disorder as well.
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
I really sought to eat locally and just like anything you can think of of what makes food good. I exhaustingly tried to follow those those protocols.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Yeah. So in Mormonism, the first Sunday of each month is set aside as Fast Sunday. So you fast for 24 hours without food or water. And now this is a it's considered a covenant, a two way promise with God. It's meant to renew the vows you take when you're baptized of following Christ and living a life that's sanctified.
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
You know, it's considered a very tender time and a time to connect again with spirit, again, by denying the body, right? So that message was there. And technically your baptismal covenants, Mormon children are baptized at the age of eight because presumably by then that's the age of accountability because at eight you can make your own decisions apparently.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
But I was precocious and I wanted to prepare for my eventual baptismal covenants. So I started fasting, yeah, before I was baptized when I was seven.
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And that was, you know, those were in the years after my mother had died and I really was seeking some degree of safety in the world and feeling like held by my father and brothers and just the... Being good, I am certainly not the first daughter to feel like if I'm good, then I will, you know, be filling my role within the family.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
You know, we were speaking earlier about eating disorders as a function of seeking control in a world that inherently you cannot control. I feel, too, that the root of that is a desire for safety. And my mother's sudden and violent death felt like being uprooted, that I lost the sense of safety in the world. I lost the sense that you can reasonably expect to live through the day.
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And I think many people have that at some point in their lives, like that kind of understanding of your own mortality and your understanding that this is finite and I just happened to have that when I was four years old. And I think that's actually left an incredible, again, you grow and you adapt and you kind of become, you grow around the things that shape you.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And then sometimes you are able to see with perception of like, oh, that has shaped me in a certain way. I tend to be slower to form relationship. I tend to take my time. I tend to hesitate in some ways because you don't know if someone's always going to be there. You know they're not, actually.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Yes, and proudly so. Within the different services, there's different ways of perceiving ourselves, but Marines are very proud of our reputation. We are the few, we are the proud, we are the smallest branch, and we are fiercely proud of having the highest physical standards. There were just so few of us women. There was a certain weight and expectation of needing to meet male standards.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
That's just like a, just one of the funny, not funny, but one of the strange shadows of losing a parent so young, I think.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Yeah, no, I really appreciate that. And I, you know, I tried to fit in a little bit of optimism at the end of the book because the years since leaving the Marine Corps have been so beautiful. I have been outrageously blessed and just have had a really great, great last decade or so. Yoga was very transformative.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
I've practiced and taught for almost a decade and just learned different perspectives of feeling like my body is an ally. And not something to subjugate, but something like I think of my body as a teacher and like a very good teacher and a profoundly wise and intuitive teacher. And I know this book is quite dark. I know I worked with some really dark elements within it.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
But I also would name that I feel so much joy within my physical being and within my relationships and within my family. And I know in my heart that some of that joy I would not feel in quite the same way Had I not known the alternative.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
So, yes, I feel great joy in my body and a gratitude that comes from recovery and knowing that there was a different way to live in my body that is no longer my story.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
I enlisted as a Mormon girl and had a very particular perception of what the military was and what it was I would be doing. Growing up, we had a copy of an oil painting that I absolutely loved. It was a depiction of General George Washington kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge and praying.
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And in Mormon culture, if not doctrine, there's this understanding that all of world history, all the affairs of human enterprise were divinely set up the way they were to ultimately accumulate in a 14-year-old boy named Joseph Smith being in Palmyra, New York, to receive these golden plates that were then translated into the Book of Mormon. And so in this conceptualization of the cosmos,
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
I understood the United States as the promised land and that we spoke of it as the promised land. And it's sometimes referred to as the cradle of restoration. Now, that narrative has started to change within the Mormon church as that church has become much more global in nature. But it was certainly something I grew up with.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
So from that lens, joining the military was an act of safeguarding the promised land. Very grandiose concept. And if I was going to do it, of course, I was going to go for the most stringent, most demanding, most, in my opinion, honorable branch.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Yes. And that was such a powerful aftershock of an all-male clergy and the whole conversation of men having an inherent discernment that as a woman, it was my job to support and facilitate and follow, but not to question. And that definitely set me up to be very susceptible to some of the baser sexism that I encountered in the Marine Corps.
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
I knew nothing. I somehow had picked up just in the social ether that the Marine Corps was like the hardest core or the most demanding. In line with being raised in a very conservative household, I never heard any criticism of the military. I was blithely unaware that there was any, actually.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
I was unaware that we'd been anything other than wildly successful in all of our affairs abroad and had only ever heard hero worship.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
I knew that some of the stories, the narratives that I'd been told of what it meant to be a girl and what it meant to be a woman did not feel right in my body. I really struggled with some components of Mormon culture that I experienced as a reprimand to be smaller, to be quieter, to be a follower and not a leader. I knew that I didn't want that, but I still had these
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
you know, just like the imprint of that incredibly patriarchal upbringing that made it very hard for me to even understand that there was another way to live. I assumed somebody needed to be in charge of me. I needed some structure, some leadership, some degree of something I could plug into some organization where I could feel like I was participant.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And the Marine Corps was, you know, I just describe it, it was another religion for me.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Yes. Well, actually, I openly disclosed it because I wasn't sure if it would disqualify me.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
About the same thing that I heard any time I tried to get help for my eating disorder once it resurged and became significantly worse once I was in, which is, well, you're not really skinny enough to have an eating disorder, so it's probably not that bad. The recruiter said something pretty similar. Well, you look fine.
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
CHIT is a medical order from a doctor that exempts you from physical duty to some degree. For example, if you're on CHIT, you might be on CHIT to not run for a while while your ACL is mending, something like that. Here's a neat little tip from a misinformed corporal during a nutrition briefing. So nearly entirely wrong. It felt like being sandpapered.
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
If you want to lose weight, pick your goal weight and add a zero to it. And that's how many calories you should eat in a day. Intriguing. That allotted me 970 calories a day. If you want to mess up your head even faster, run 16 miles and still only eat your goal weight plus zero calories. Then you too can wake up in the middle of the night with hunger kneading your stomach from the inside.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
I nod my knuckles in my sleep. I woke up with blood on my pillow, noting with mild interest I was resorting to self-cannibalism. I turned the pillow over. I routinely slept with ice packs on bare shins. The frostbite blended in with other scars, mottled like blue bark. Damn, Williams, you must be the first Marine to get frostbite in Monterey, and NCO laughed. I laughed along. Hilarious.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
If no pain, no gain, then I was rocking. Every time someone implied it was characteristic of females to be fat and broken, I furiously clocked another mile, right hip clicking along. When rumors circulated a female was malingering for going on shit, I flew out the door, shoelaces double knotted, shouting at my injury to go on, hit me. And when she was asking for it,
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
or she's lying, she wanted it, I protested by running long hauls along the gray coast. I rarely cried. Sometimes, though, in the gray cocoon of oceanic fog, miles alone up the coast, hunger cracked into something else. Then I slowed on the sand, dropped my hands to my thighs, and took shuddering breaths.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
First, thank you so much for your kind words. The hope with how unflinching the writing is was to show what that space was like, simply because when I had an eating disorder, people who really loved me and were really trying to be kind would just say the worst things. It was like, maybe I can illustrate what this looks like from where I'm standing.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
And hopefully it'll help other folks who have eating disorders or love people who do. I worked on this book for nine years. The bulk of it was written by the time I was about 26 or 27. And And the writing coincided with recovery. I have spent the last decade in the meditation and mindfulness space. I've been a yoga teacher. That's been my major way of supporting myself for years. And for me...
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
You know, the events in the book, it's just my increasingly deranged quest to make myself fit in by being smaller because that's what I feel is being asked of me. And I use the term deranged really intentionally. I believe it comes from the French to be removed from the land, de ranger, to have a lack of relationship with land. And so for me...
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Writing was the accumulation of a lot of miles spent walking. I left the Marine Corps with an injury that really hurt, and what helped for me was movement. And I started walking and started backpacking and spent most of my 20s backpacking as much as I could, as frequently as I could, and building up this new story in my body.
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Because the story in Hollow, I feel within my own body that I am inherently weak. And over the years of writing it, I was actively working on cultivating this new story in my body, which is actually I'm really strong. And I'm very much capable of holding this younger self that didn't have me. It didn't have that sense of value and self-worth and strength.
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
This is the heart of the paradox, right? Like an eating disorder weakens you. An eating disorder weakens you, but you don't see it that way when you're in it. I knew that what I was doing was harming me. I could feel it, especially in the end when I was very sick indeed.
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Like, I could feel, like, these warning lights dimly going off in my body of, like, this is not – like, something is very wrong internally. And yet I always found this mental acrobatics to justify my eating disorder as the only thing that would fix it. The problem, for example – okay, so – binging and purging, that felt awful. It was just a horrible experience.
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
So obviously the answer was I needed to just not eat, right? Like that's going to fix it, which is not at all true. It was so inconceivable to me that to feed myself would actually strengthen me. I think this really speaks to how inherently unsustainable an eating disorder is because effectively you are
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
crippling your energetic force right like you're you're taking your life force and you're trying to constrict it and say i can live on less and then i can live on even less than that i can live on you in this like you're i felt like i was drawing my my life closer and closer within me and like wrapping it as close as i could around the bones because i felt like somewhere really really deep inside if i just kept this archaeological expedition somewhere some deep down layer of me was good and worthwhile i just had to find it and that mindset is inherently crippling
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A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
compared to you have worth and value exactly as you are, so feed yourself.
Fresh Air
A Marine's Portrait Of Her Body At Extremes
Oh, admiration and approval, definitely. Definitely. In fact, I once or twice heard men stand up for me because they saw me running so much. There was one time I dropped into a colleague's barracks room to borrow a book, The Psychology of Killing. I remember that distinctly. Went in, borrowed this book, and at that moment, the NCO on duty walked by.