“I have a ton of mentees,” she tells me over the phone. “They’re all people of color. Some of them are poor. And I’m just trying to help them learn how to be great writers; and for those that have become really good writers, I help them get representation; and those that have representation, I want to help get them jobs. That to me is a form of activism. I was doing this before Time’s Up was created. I am doing it now. Activism is me paying for a writer to go to a television-writing class.”
It is during one of these conversations that I ask her about what happened with her friend and Master of None co-star, Aziz Ansari, who, in a controversial online article, was accused of sexual misconduct by a woman he once went on a date with. (Ansari stated that their sexual activity was consensual.) Lena gets quieter, more thoughtful. “At the end of the day,” Lena says, “what I would hope comes out of this is that we as a society . . . educate ourselves about what consent is—what it looks like, what it feels like, what it sounds like. I think there are both men and women who are still trying to figure it out. We need to be more attuned to each other, pay more attention to each other, in every scenario, and really make sure that, whatever it is we’re doing with someone else, they’re comfortable doing whatever that thing is, and that we’re doing it together. That’s just human kindness and decency.”
And then, a day or two later, we hop on the phone to scream about the success of Black Panther. We just have to. And Lena, being Lena, has already broken down the context of this moment. “You see history books—A.D. or B.C.?,” she asks. “I feel like the world felt one way before B.P. and will feel forever changed A.B.P. These execs are all looking around and saying to themselves, ‘Shit, we want a Black Panther; we want a movie where motherfuckers come out in droves and see it multiple times and buy out movie theaters.’ And because we also live in a town of copycats, there are going to be a lot of bad black superhero movies coming because everybody ain’t Ryan Coogler!”
Lena, naturally, comes back to the beginning, returning to the roots of her storytelling. “I used to watch TV with my grandmother a ton. I watched a lot of old [classic sitcom] TV. And it gave me an education in using your platform to protest, but without being preachy. And how you can use TV characters, fictitious characters, as a way to speak to who we are as a society.
“I am tired of white folks telling my stories. We gotta tell our shit. Can’t no one tell a black story, particularly a queer story, the way I can, because I see the God in us. James Baldwin saw the God in us. Zora saw the God in us. When I’m looking for myself, I find myself in the pages of Baldwin.”
Then she adds, “I didn’t realize I was born to stand out as much as I do. But I’m grateful. Because the other black or brown queer kids are like, ‘Oh, we the shit.’” Lena flashes a huge smile, then shakes her head with wonder.
MICHELLE WILLIAMS
THE CHANGE AGENT
By Amanda Fortini | July 2018
At the end of November, as Ridley Scott and the cast of All the Money in the World were in the midst of nine days of re-shoots in Rome and London, The Washington Post ran an article about pay disparities among the cast, specifically between Mark Wahlberg, the male lead, and Michelle Williams, his female co-star. Exactly how egregious the gap we would not learn until early January, when USA Today reported that Wahlberg, who in August 2017 was named the highest-paid actor of the year by Forbes, with annual earnings of $68 million, was being paid $1.5 million. Williams, on the other hand, who has been nominated for four Oscars, five Golden Globes (she won for My Week with Marilyn in 2012), and a Tony, was paid an $80 per diem, which amounted to less than $1,000 total. The additional filming was to re-create Kevin Spacey’s scenes after the actor was accused of sexual misconduct and replaced with Christopher Plummer. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask for money for the re-shoots. I just wanted to do the right thing on his behalf,” says Williams, referring to Anthony Rapp, the actor who accused Spacey of sexually assaulting him when he was 14 years old.
It’s a muggy afternoon in June when Williams and I meet at a Williamsburg hotel that’s all concrete floors and hip austerity, and sits at what might be the most hectic, throbbing corner in Brooklyn. The actress, one of the borough’s better-known residents, has lived in the Boerum Hill and Red Hook neighborhoods since 2005. On the day we meet she is about to move to a new part of Brooklyn, a location she has not yet disclosed, with a partner she has not yet made public. If you know anything about Williams, it’s that she is the Thomas Pynchon of the film world—almost immaculately private.
Initially, there was talk of arranging an “activity” for us to do together. We’d look at art or visit the Cloisters, and I’d later extrapolate meaning from this or that comment, in the usual profile style. But a few days before the interview, I’m told that Williams would like to talk about income disparity in Hollywood, specifically her own. She was, after all, paid less than one-tenth of 1 percent of her male co-star’s fee—a discrepancy so glaring that it caused a massive outcry online. In the end, Wahlberg donated his entire re-shoot fee to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which had been established a few weeks prior, and William Morris Endeavor, the agency representing both actors, threw in an additional $500,000. It was difficult to imagine Williams discussing any of this among museum patrons and prying iPhones, so we are here, on a boat-size leather sectional sofa, in an upper-floor suite that overlooks the warehouses and luxury apartment buildings lining the East River, with a blasting air conditioner that Williams immediately turns off.
“I read somewhere that things are kept cold for men, because men prefer to be cooler while women prefer to be warmer,” she says, and then moves herself, with the tensile grace of a cat, into one corner of the giant iceberg of a sofa. “Office buildings are kept colder for men.” It’s an apt metaphor for the many inequities, small and large—from irritatingly arctic air-conditioning to life-altering wage gaps—women contend with.
“You feel totally de-valued,” she says, when I ask whether she was enraged to learn of the money Wahlberg received. Like everyone else, she read it in the paper. “But that also chimes in with pretty much every other experience you’ve had in your workplace, so you just learn to swallow it.” She speaks deliberately, often closing her eyes as she enunciates, in what I will come to recognize as her meticulous, clear, and thoughtful manner, as though each word is put through a process of inspection. She tells me that the ultimate outcome pleased her, in that it sparked a cultural conversation and will eventually, she hopes, bring tangible change. “A private humiliation,” she says, “became a public turning point.”
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The night before we meet, Williams worked until three a.m. She is filming Bart Freundlich’s remake of the Danish film After the Wedding, in which she and Julianne Moore play the two formerly male lead roles, before she will fly to L.A. to do re-shoots for Venom, Sony’s upcoming Marvel movie, in which she stars as Anne Weying, the ex-wife of Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy). She’s dressed in the unadorned, vaguely vintage style specific to artsy-intellectual Brooklyn—flared jeans, a white linen shirt tied at the waist, ballet flats, straw bag, no makeup. That morning, she tells me, she awoke bone-tired and, like most women, fretful about her skin; she’s been in full, pore-clogging stage makeup for two weeks running. “And I’m like, Oh well, it’s O.K. It’s a new world,” she says. “I’m not going to walk into an interview where somebody’s like, ‘Her smell is blah, blah,’ or ‘Her skin is bare . . . ’ Everything opens—at least it used to—with, like, a sexual description of the woman’s worth, the exact kind or quality of her beauty. You know what I mean? It’s so nice to know that I’m not walking into that.”
I do know what she means, and assure her I will not be talking about her complexion or marveling that she ate a cheeseburger. We don’t even order food. Instead, we drink cup after cup of room-service coffee and talk about motherhood, books, grief, her creative process, and her w
ork.
Her recent career choices feel distinct from the independent films she’s become known for, like Derek Cianfrance’s gritty, close-shot Blue Valentine or any of Kelly Reichardt’s visual tone poems. In December, she sang and danced as the wife of Hugh Jackman’s P. T. Barnum in The Greatest Showman. This spring, in an ingenious comic turn, she played Avery LeClaire, an Aerin Lauder–esque makeup heiress with a breathy, high-pitched voice, in the Amy Schumer movie I Feel Pretty. Viewers and critics were delighted to see this new side of her; writing in the Huffington Post, Matthew Jacobs called her “bonkers work” in the film “delicious.”
But perhaps the greatest measure that a career shift is afoot for her is that in the past year she has starred in a big-budget Ridley Scott film and, in October, will appear in a Marvel movie. “I always like to do things I haven’t done before—genres, parts. I like a challenge,” Williams says, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “And one of those challenges has been stepping into a bigger world.” She explains that she is most at home on a small, familial set, like a Reichardt film (“where I can walk around in my underwear and say the wrong thing”), but with All the Money in the World and now Venom, she is opening herself up to “a bigger set, and strangers, and multiple monitors, and people weighing in.”
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Williams’s first big-screen role was in the 1994 movie Lassie, at the age of 14. The following year, she was emancipated from her parents and moved, by herself, from San Diego to Los Angeles. It wasn’t long until she was cast as wild child Jen Lindley on Dawson’s Creek, in 1998, a role she played for six years. “I had a steady gig, which was great,” she says, “but I didn’t have the thing I most wanted, which was respect and a good sense of myself—I wasn’t viewed as an artist.” Even back then her taste ran to the sort of arty, independent films she’s become known for. She appeared in a handful of those (Prozac Nation, The Station Agent, The United States of Leland), but her career break came in 2004, when she was cast in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.
For her quietly devastating portrayal of Alma, the spurned wife of a closeted gay cowboy, she earned a best-supporting-actress Oscar nomination, her first. “Her truthfulness in the part was just heartbreaking,” says Lee. “This is two gay cowboys’ story, but your heart breaks for the woman, and that’s an effect of the fact she’s so great.” The cowboy husband, Ennis, was played by the late Heath Ledger, who, over the course of filming, became her real-life love. Williams was soon pregnant; their baby, Matilda, was born just before the movie opened, and the couple bought a sprawling town house in Boerum Hill. Their accelerated fairy tale was catnip for the media, and the pair were frequently photographed pushing a stroller around Brooklyn. But they split after three years together. Five months later, in January 2008, Ledger was found dead of a drug overdose in a SoHo apartment he was renting at the time.
The paparazzi descended on Williams and her two-year-old daughter, forming what one writer would call a “morbid cult.” Says her friend Daphne Javitch, a holistic-nutrition coach who lived with Williams in the couple’s home after Ledger died: “To have that kind of attention, in such an aggressive way, around you and your child, when so much of it is coming from what truly is tragedy for a family . . . it’s a kind of violence.” The actress eventually fled Brooklyn for rural upstate New York. There, she bought a house and raised Matilda—taking her on location when she was filming—for the next six years. “It was unmanageable to be stalked like that,” she tells me now, “every moment of the day. So I left, in a desire to create a sane home environment.” An anecdote underscores the relentlessness with which she was pursued: “I’ll never forget going to the post office and seeing a sign hung on the wall for anyone with information about myself and my daughter, to please call this number.” She smiles wryly. “Um, so I took that down.”
Williams is an inherently private person, and being hounded pushed her further into her shell. “She always had a difficult time with the idea of doing press and what to reveal,” says actress Busy Philipps, who was Williams’s co-star on Dawson’s Creek and has remained her closest friend. “And then obviously when Heath passed away, and people had this insatiable interest in her and her child and their grief, it was overwhelming and incredibly painful.” When I ask Williams about this time, she makes a slight throat-clearing noise, as she does whenever the hurdle of a difficult subject presents itself. “When you’re a single parent, and that element of provider and protection is missing, it’s scary,” she says simply.
Williams was born in Kalispell, Montana (her mom, Carla, was a homemaker and her dad, Larry, a commodities trader who twice ran unsuccessfully as the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate), and upstate she hoped to give Matilda the connection to nature she’d had as a girl. “You know, getting on a bicycle and being out and coming back for meals, and exploring snakeskins and arrowheads and cliffs and plants and abandoned houses, and having that sense of freedom and safety in the world,” she remembers. (When she was nine, her family moved to San Diego in search of more temperate winters.) The natural surroundings, gardening, and planting were all a salve for her, too. “I just remember thinking, like, Hmm, maybe there’s something green in me that’s growing that I can’t see yet,” she says. But even far away from the tabloid searchlights, the narrative of Ledger’s death would continue to haunt the next decade of Williams’s life.
For fans of her work, the persistence of personal tragedy as the dominant thread in almost everything written about her is understandable but also irritating. During the past 10 years, in a series of small and often unexpected films, she has emerged as one of the most gifted actresses working today—not a movie star who plays a version of herself in film after film but a genuine artist, a chameleon who wholly inhabits the character at hand, in the vein of Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore. “It’s this unusual thing that she has,” says Bart Freundlich, “which is constant complexity with total clarity at the same time. Even when things are simple and clear it feels like there are layers and layers behind them.”
Unlike many actors, Williams has no qualms about playing unlikable characters without pandering to the audience; she infuses them with such authentic humanity that viewers often end up empathizing with them. There was the tightly coiled, unhappily married nurse in Blue Valentine (for which she was nominated for a best-actress Oscar) and the drugged-up, manipulative sexpot Monroe in My Week with Marilyn. There are Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, and Certain Women, the trio of quiet, spare films she made with Reichardt, in which her acting is so nuanced, her performances such triumphs of understatement, that she conveys a world of feeling with the subtlest of expressions. And then there’s Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea. She’s in only a handful of scenes—most memorably one in which she breaks down before her ex-husband (Casey Affleck), revealing the black, bottomless, unbearable grief of a mother who has lost three children—but they are pivotal, providing the characters with a wrenching backstory. “Her presence pervades the film even in her absence,” says Lonergan. “Even when she’s a voice on the telephone, or a slow-motion mourner at a funeral, her sense of reality, her strength, and her enormous gentleness change every scene she’s in.”
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The fact that Williams is so private, her misfortune was so public, and her film roles so intense have all contributed to what feels like a fundamental misreading of her. When she is portrayed with any particularity, it is as a kind of delicate bird, broken and still grieving. Instead, I find a witty, reflective, cerebral, and precise person who is far less guarded than I expected. “We know her as very funny and light,” says Marc Silverstein, who wrote and directed I Feel Pretty with Abby Kohn and is married to Philipps, “though her filmography does not suggest that at all.”
She is also studiously bookish and cultured, in the way autodidacts often are. She talks in evocative, poetic metaphors. (“Single-parenting,” she says, c
an feel like life is held together by “a thread and a paper clip.”) In the course of our interviews, she refers to the work of Colson Whitehead, Andrew Solomon, Annie Dillard, Elena Ferrante, Rebecca Solnit, Maile Meloy, Jim Harrison (his poetry, she tells me, not Dalva), Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau. She quotes one of Harrison’s poems at remarkable length, and several times from soccer star Abby Wambach’s recent commencement speech at Barnard. Her friends say that she is the one to discover new writers and press books on them. “She told me about Elena Ferrante before anyone fucking knew about Elena Ferrante,” recalls Philipps.
As I listen to Williams, I am struck by the thought that in our bare-all era, “private” is often conflated with “sensitive” or “fragile,” when in fact a fierce demand for privacy might mean a person is uncompromising and tough. Someone who moved upstate alone, raised a daughter on her own, built and navigated the vicissitudes of a high-profile career, and remained sane and solid in the process is pretty much the opposite of the way the media portrays her. “She’s not like a precious fucking flower that’s going to get crushed,” Philipps says. “That’s the thing that drives me a little bit crazy when people talk about her and write about her. She’s one of the strongest people I know—one of the toughest bitches around. She’s still here, she’s still working, and not only is she still working, she’s like the best there is.”
Now, more than a decade after Ledger’s death, with her career advancing in surprising new directions and her daughter entering seventh grade, Williams is inhabiting, quite intentionally, a larger, less rarefied, more vocal and open version of herself. For example, this very circumspect person was unwittingly made the poster child for pay inequity—an issue that affects women in every industry—and despite her native discomfort, she’s trying to make the most of her platform. “It’s a very hard thing for me to navigate,” she says, “because my instinct is to keep my life very, very private. But I also need and want certain things out of my career that demand I assume a more public voice.”
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