Michelle Williams looked flawless in Louis Vuitton silver-embroidered sheer black dress at a special screening of her buzzed-about drama, Manchester by the Sea, at the Crosby Street Hotel on Sunday night. But the actress sheepishly admitted to a fashion faux pas that may seem surprising.
“I recently had to make a return to an online order that I had made because I realized I had gotten too comfortable,” she explained and then added, “I overdosed on flannel. It showed up and even my mother said, ‘You have to send that back, you are still a young woman.’”
Even more egregious, the offending flannel items were . . . housecoats.
“It got a little scary for a second,” the 36-year-old actress laughingly confessed. “I sent it back and I realized there’s a bridge between comfort and fashion and I’m not ready to walk over to the other side of it completely.”
In Manchester by the Sea, a searing, heartfelt film that also stars Casey Affleck, Williams plays a woman who suffers devastating loss. She admits the role was emotionally draining.
“I did go home weeping every night and alone which is even more devastating,” she says. “It was filmed just outside of Boston, a four-hour train ride so I would go up for a day, two days, maybe three days at a time max and my daughter was in school so she’d be here in New York and I would be going to my little apartment in a rental complex at the end of each of these days alone doing these scenes, crying all the way home and then getting into someone else’s bed and feeling like just about the loneliest person in the world.”
The intimate Kenneth Lonergan–directed movie has already garnered a bevy of rave reviews and is almost certain to pick up some Oscar nominations, too. All this chatter means a lot of red carpet activity for Williams but she is nonplussed about what to wear.
“I’m really lucky because I have a relationship with a brand [Louis Vuitton] and a designer and Nicolas [Ghesquière] is a great friend and even better designer so there’s a certain kind of comfort and known quality to what we work on and what we come up with together for me to wear,” she explains.
“It takes a lot of the nervousness out of the process [if] you’re working with people you know so well,” she continued. “It’s now a three-year relationship, they’re my friends, they’re on my Christmas-card list!”