Michelle Williams on Bringing Her #MeToo Awakening to Her Role in Venom
EntertainmentAt first, I thought Michelle Williams and I were going to have a 15-minute conversation about superheroes and CGI. The four-time Oscar-nominated actor has brought her considerable talents to the latest Marvel movie—the Spider-Man-adjacent and refreshingly bizarre Venom (which, among other things, is sort of a buddy comedy about a dude and his alien parasite). Williams plays Anne, an attorney, opposite Tom Hardy’s journalist character Eddie, who’s infected with an alien virus (a “symbiote”) that gives him superhuman strength, a black shiny leotard, and a taste for human heads. Spoilers ahead. While certainly secondary to… all of that, Anne isn’t quite the typical superhero girlfriend—she dumps Eddie early on after he breaches her trust, for one thing, but then stays in touch with him, and then as the action intensifies in the movie’s superior second half, she gets in on the action herself.
Williams is notoriously sharp and frank. Earlier this year, she discussed with Vanity Fair the financial incentive for signing onto a superhero film of Venom’s scope: “Before this, I had a real fixation on… purity, but I’ve started to address that notion as I’ve gotten older, and as I talk to more women, and more women artists, and I think about my long-term future, I’ve started to adjust my thinking about… how to make a life, how to support a life.” I spoke with Williams last Friday, the day after the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. When I asked how her week was going, the conversation took a turn from the explicitly promotional. She thoughtfully discussed #MeToo, as well as the pay disparity she experienced with Mark Wahlberg over All the Money in the World reshoots (she reportedly received $1,000 versus his $1.5 million). I found her to be candid and open beyond the usual expectations of a press junket, which can be frustrating-to-disastrous for an interviewer interested in actual substance. An edited and condensed transcript of our brief phone chat is below.
JEZEBEL: I thought this movie was fun.
MICHELLE WILLIAMS: I haven’t seen it yet, so you know more about it than I do. You really care so much more about the thing that you’re making rather than the outcome. I’m curious about it, but it’s not where my real investment lies. My real investment is between action and cut. But I’m curious about how it all turns out.
Do you approach project of this scale any differently than you would the type of smaller, independent movie that you’ve been known to take on?
I really don’t. I still spend a ton of time thinking about it, preparing for it. Quote-unquote research comes to mind. By research, I don’t always mean reading books, I mean like: What does it remind me of? What does it make me think of? Can I relate it to anything else in any other medium?
For this, I really wanted it to be specific to this moment in time that we’re living in, in terms of what it feels like to be a woman right now. I wanted to be able to pin it in 2017/2018. We’re in an alternate universe where many things in possible, and I wanted it to be possible in this moment in time for my character to have a lot of self-respect—so much self-respect that she stands up for herself and walks away from a relationship that she can’t abide by morally. I wanted it to feel empowered. I wanted it to feel post-#MeToo. I wanted it to feel a little bit socially relevant.
“I wanted it to feel empowered. I wanted it to feel post-#MeToo. I wanted it to feel a little bit socially relevant.”
Did that draw you to the script, or did you infuse the role with some of those sensibilities on your own?
A lot of the work I did was figuring out ways to sneak that in. Nobody’s going to go see this movie because of the social import or relationship details. And I don’t mean to get boring or didactic about that. I just mean it’ll be nice if we can do some of this gender play. Anne gets to play with some masculine qualities and Eddie gets to play with some feminine qualities, just little things like bringing that out in the wardrobe. Who wears the pants in this relationship? They both do. She’s the one in the tie, and he’s the one taking the tie off. Things like that, maybe they just tickle me, but I thought they’d be fun to drop in there.