In Regretting You, Allison Williams comes back to a role that feels closer to her life than the series of horror films she previously took on. Photo / Sela Shiloni, The New York Times
The Girls actress discusses film roles, family and exactly how often she lets herself sing.
Allison Williams regrets the bronzer she used as a teenager – the quality, the placement. She regrets the black eyeliner repurposed as an eyebrow pencil. “I’ve seen TikToks of people doing nostalgic early 2000s makeup, and it’s too close to home,” she said. “It’s exactly accurate.”
Williams, 37, has since grown up, often on-screen. She played Marnie, a try-hard song-prone protagonist of the pivotal HBO series Girls, and then had roles in a series of buzzy horror films: Get Out, The Perfection, M3gan and its sequel. These days her makeup is impeccable.
Regretting You (in theatres now), director Josh Boone’s adaptation of the Colleen Hoover novel, put Williams face-to-face with the teenage version of herself. She plays Morgan, a woman in her 30s who became pregnant at 17. A family tragedy compels her to reassess her life and her relationships with her daughter, Clara (Mckenna Grace), now 16, and an old friend, Jonah (Dave Franco). In flashbacks – with careful lighting and slight de-ageing – Williams also plays Morgan as a teen.
On a recent weekday morning, Williams, the daughter of news anchor Brian Williams and TV producer Jane Stoddard Williams, looked very much the adult as she strode through the American Museum of Natural History in coordinated separates and a long coat. Then she opened her mouth. “Oh, God, it’s just so cool,” she rhapsodised as she circled back, wide-eyed, to a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil. As a teenager she felt like she had to police her inner theatre kid, now as a mother to a young son (she is married to actor Alexander Dreymon), she feels more free to nerd out.
Regretting You is another return to youth. After Girls, she more or less abandoned romantic heroines, in part to show her range and also because Marnie (and through her, Williams) became a target for online outrage. A little space seemed healthy. While Williams remains acutely aware of her privilege (and unafraid to use it, at least when it means a chance to preview the museum’s Apex Stegosaurus), she now feels ready to re-engage with roles that feel closer to her life than, say, homicidal-doll inventor. “I want to examine the things that I’m unlocking as I live – relationships, marriage, motherhood,” she said. Also Regretting You made her dad cry.
In an hour-long chat, in and out of the museum’s dinosaur wing, Williams peppered her speech with words like “fossilised” and “excavate” as she discussed career, motherhood and whether she could comfortably vandalise a car. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q: I’ve read that when you’re weighing a role, you always ask yourself three questions: Why this? Why me? Why now? How do those apply to Regretting You?
A: It felt nostalgic to me, like the kind of movie that used to just fill the shelves of Blockbuster. Clearly I was meant to first learn a lot of the lessons I learned from doing horror, dislodging this Marnie thing from me, which was hard. After I read the book and the script, I was like, Morgan is the kind of character that is a little bit exhausting. I want to try to express her experience in a way that’s as sympathetic as possible. Why now? The world is on fire, everything’s a nightmare, life is full of stimuli and when I get into bed these days, what I want is to just escape into another world that’s just like ours, but where people are behaving in a way that is frustrating but relatable. That is the Hooververse.
Q: Who is Morgan?
A: Morgan is someone who’s in suspended animation. She became a mum at 17 and just stopped. She made a choice that I would not have made. And she has just been existing to be Clara’s mum and her sister’s keeper and her husband’s caretaker and she has not stopped to ask herself any of the big probing existential questions. We are meeting her when her daughter is the same age she got pregnant. Morgan is desperate to shepherd her through this threshold differently.
Q: Is this an Allison Williams type?
A: It starts as a type I’ve played before in that she’s closed off from parts of herself. What was so nice was being able to play her as those parts were revealed and actually feel that vulnerability. Most of the other characters I’ve played have kept their social distance from the audience for most of the movie, so it was really nice to be able to show rage and sadness and go through all of the steps of grief.
Q: Well, thank you for representing the uptight ladies.
A: Someone’s got to keep all this [expletive] going, keep it organised. The world has to keep running.
Q: What’s the fun of playing a tightly-wound woman fully unwinding?
A: It’s beyond fun. And honestly I have to work against my instinct to just go all the way. I have to pull on my own reins every now and then. I want to just break, just shatter, drop the character and fall completely, totally apart. I love that part of playing Morgan where she’ll beat the [expletive] out of the car and then go home and yell at her daughter for missing her curfew. That feels right to me.
Q: Do you have those freedoms in your own life? You live in Connecticut, out of the public eye. Do you have the space to beat the [expletive] out of a car?
A: I don’t know whose car or in what way, but I think I could. I can get overstimulated really easily and being too much in the world, not being able to retreat to a quiet place would make me a worse mum and partner. Anyone who has any kind of anxiety in their system knows that the retreat is super important.
Q: I was reading old interviews with you and the comments were sometimes vitriolic. People hated you so much. Do you understand why?
A: Deeply. First, the theatre kid energy is triggering for a lot of people. There’s a reason I don’t sing regularly. I get to do it once a decade without it becoming too annoying. The other thing is, I have so many different layers of privilege that it’s hard for me to put together the idea of a person it would be less fun to root for. I’m much more satisfying to root against. I really get it. I really, really get it. I always have cared about what people think about me, I still do, but I can’t begrudge people their reactions. I feel like it’s changed though. Gen Z has a totally different read on Marnie. They have a much more charitable and warm feeling toward her.
Q: Is Morgan a good mother?
A: In the Winnicott sense, she’s a good enough mother. She has an alive, thriving daughter who has pretty good morals and values and is rebelling at the right time. But she doesn’t think she’s as good as she wants to be.
Q: You’re the mother of a young son, what’s it like to imaginatively parent a teenager?
A: Imagination is good, but the only way to do any of those things is to find the grain of relevancy to yourself. Apparently the stage of development that most closely mirrors teenagerhood is toddlerhood. And luckily I have many years to prepare and people wiser than me to tell me what they learned. When I thought about Morgan doing it, I drew from the people I know who had kids really young.
Q: What’s it like seeing your de-aged teen self onscreen?
A: M3gan got me used to it, because M3gan is literally built to be poreless and perfect. Anytime I had to share the screen with her, I was like, I’m so resentful of this. So that broke me. But honestly it feels fine. I was never on camera professionally at 17, but I remember what I looked like. And I’m happy to be where I am.
Q: How do you understand the fantasy of reconnecting with someone who knew you as a teenager?
A: It’s that nostalgia of when romance first becomes real to you, that person fossilised in that time then coming back into your life and fitting the adult version of you. What usually happens is that person as an adult, you’re like, this is so weird that I ever have a fantasy feeling for you.
Q: The horror movies that you’ve done have very explicitly been about something – racism, predation, our fears around AI murder dolls. What is this about?
I was just reflecting about how weird it is to be talking about a movie without talking about an issue that’s bigger. I was like, “Oh no, there’s no issue bigger than loss and family.” With this one, it gets to just be about grief, parenthood, self-worth, passion. That feels nice. It also feels a little bit like a tonic.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alexis Soloski
Photographs by: Sela Shiloni
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