Michelle Williams talks about starring in Dying For Sex — a dark but funny TV series based on a true story about a woman with stage four cancer who, facing death, decides to take ownership of her sexual pleasure. Also, we hear from Sarah Snook. She's best known for her role on HBO's Succession as Shiv Roy. She tells us why she almost didn't audition for the part. Snook was recently nominated for a Tony for her performance on Broadway in the stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is 'Dying for Sex' about?
And the sweet, very sweet ending to the story is she's moving to Brooklyn where I live and Liz lives.
Wait, you mean Jenny Slate? Jenny Slate. So in real life, right? You all became friends in real life.
Yeah, we're hitching our wagons together.
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.
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.
It was a kind of like a real open-door policy to create a sense of community.
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.
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?
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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Chapter 2: How does Michelle Williams relate to her character?
Do you remember what you did or what your take on it was that might have sort of, even though you originally didn't think it was the role for you, made them take note of you to be Shiv?
I don't know. I mean, there probably was a level of insouciance or attitude about not feeling right for this and like, you know, without using it as a succession word, F you for making me audition for this when I, you know, I'm not right for this. Like that's a bit shiv to be honest.
Like that's like a little above it, but also like showing up angry and wanting to win the test. Yeah, exactly.
As Tom says.
There you go. Yeah. Well, it occurred to me that the way Succession was filmed may have had some similarities to the way you perform your current role in Dorian Gray. I think that for Succession, there were numerous cameras following the cast as they did scenes, kind of like the cameras that follow you on stage.
Are there similarities? Yeah. Yeah, there are similarities. I mean, very different in terms of the specificity required for Dorian and the fluidity allowed in succession. But something about the proximity of cameras and the kind of subtextual or subconscious awareness of them as a character is in both Succession and Dorian has been really useful to have experienced that in Succession.
It was never like they are definitely a character and we're going to dramaturgically make them feel like that. But just the presence of, you know, like Gregor, one of the camera operators, at one point he was on the other side of the couch I was doing the scene. He's behind my back on the other side of the couch. I look over. Yep, he's still behind me on the other side of the couch.
And within three seconds, I turn and throw another line back over my shoulder and he's right behind me. He has crossed the couch somehow. He's like leapt over it with a camera in hand. And that kind of agility from the camera operators, both in Dorian and Succession, is very similar.
Wait, so you would sort of perform the scenes and it was kind of the camera people's job to sort of anticipate where you might go with it?
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