Through It All, Michelle Williams is Having a Blast
UNOBTRUSIVE AS A SHADOW, she slips into Fort Defiance wearing black jeans and a fisherman’s sweater as pale as her tousled hair, which looks as if she just rolled out of bed—except that she never went to bed last night. She’s the opposite of a diva making an entrance; this is a woman who knows how to hide in plain sight, with no makeup, no frills, no attention-grabbing gestures. In this busy restaurant in Red Hook, Brooklyn, she seems to inhabit a bubble of stillness; it’s easy to see why one critic described her as “a slight, unprepossessing person” in a review for the 2011 film Meek’s Cutoff. But when the wagon train of settlers gets lost in the wilderness and the men can’t figure out what to do, it’s her character who takes charge and becomes the unlikely heroine.
Now Michelle Williams has done it again. In Manchester by the Sea , Casey Affleck dominates the action as a handyman whose life is wrecked by an unbearable tragedy. As his ex-wife, Randi, Williams spends only a few minutes on-screen—and yet she commandeers the movie with her gut-wrenching portrayal of an ordinary woman mustering the emotional courage to endure the unendurable.
“The thing that moved me about her wasn’t her sadness,” Williams says after ordering a chai latte. “It was her bravery that moved me to tears. To think about somebody who could do that—because if it happened to me, I wouldn’t be so brave. Sometimes your mind drifts there, to the worst thing you can possibly imagine, and you say, How would I cope with the unimaginable? I can’t imagine going on.”
Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, the film is so bleak it seemed an unlikely candidate for wide renown, let alone the Oscar buzz it’s generated. But for Williams, who has already received Golden Globe and SAG award nominations as best supporting actress, Randi was the latest in a long line of idiosyncratic roles that are as unpredictable as she is. It’s hard to believe that the sensual beauty who played the ultimate sex goddess in My Week With Marilyn is the same person as the neglected wife of a closeted gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, or the driven nurse fed up with her disappointing husband in Blue Valentine—and yet Williams earned Academy Award nominations for all three performances.
“She’s a real chameleon,” says Lonergan. “I prefer character actresses who can transform themselves rather than just playing themselves over and over again, and Michelle is a brilliant actress with incredible range and power.”
She is also a woman who understands paralyzing grief. Like Randi, a mother forever shattered by a malevolent moment of fate in Manchester by the Sea, Williams is a mother who has spent years trying to recover from an irreparable loss.
After Williams and the Australian actor Heath Ledger got involved while filming Brokeback Mountain in 2004, they moved with dizzying speed from the euphoria of new love to the responsibilities of parenthood. Williams had just turned 25 when she gave birth to their daughter, Matilda, in 2005. She and Ledger separated two years later, and five months after that he died of a drug overdose at 28.
The demands of single motherhood have dictated Williams’s personal and professional choices ever since. When we meet for brunch, she’s just spent the weekend in Los Angeles promoting Manchester and flown back to New York on the Sunday red-eye in order to greet her daughter on Monday morning. “I wanted to come home, but arriving home as someone who is tired doesn’t always leave you in the best state,” she says. “I got there in time to wake her up and make her breakfast and be late for school. I was trying to do all of it, but there are loose ends.”
Although it’s only 11 a.m., Williams has already squeezed in a costume fitting for The Greatest Showman, the movie musical she’s shooting in Brooklyn with Hugh Jackman, who stars as P.T. Barnum. For Williams, this has been a busy season; in addition to Manchester, the closing months of 2016 brought the release of Certain Women, which stars Williams, Laura Dern and Kristen Stewart.
“Two tiny parts in two tiny movies I never expected anyone to see—that’s really the only film work I’ve done for three and a half years,” Williams says. “It seems busy now, but that comes on the heels of a lot of space, a lot of waiting. It’s been a slow time, as far as making movies is concerned.”
Williams compensated with two major roles on Broadway, starring in Cabaret as the hard-partying Sally and in Blackbird as the furious, heartbroken Una, who is struggling to come to terms with the sexual relationship she had with a middle-aged neighbor when she was 12. Such parts can be harrowing, but Williams is eager for more stage work.
“I look forward to going back as soon as possible,” she says fervently. “It’s harder than movies, and I’m hooked on the hard thing. I believe in the hard way. Long recipes, no shortcuts. I like things that take time. We only have so much time; we only have one life. That’s time I want to spend on things that really are worth time.”
When I ask if eight performances a week ever tempted her to phone it in, Williams looks horrified. “Never!” she exclaims. “Every night you’re thinking this is an opportunity to do the best show you’ve ever done. My work is the place I allow myself to take risks that I don’t necessarily in my day-to-day life. The worst that can happen in my work is that I’m bad, and that makes it harder for me to get the next job. But my friends will still love me, and my daughter will still think I’m great.”
Finding suitable film roles is tougher, and their demands often conflict with her daughter’s needs. “I think about work and how to do both all the time,” Williams says. “I worry about the next job and when it’s coming and will I be able to get it, but when you’re looking at something, there’s also the criteria of timing, the school calendar, the location, the duration and just where we’re at as a family. How much does this work for me as a person, and how much does this work for my family? Sometimes they balance up perfectly, and sometimes they lean in one direction.”
But Williams can no longer pack up her 11-year-old daughter and bring her along while shooting a movie. “We haven’t been on location in five years; I haven’t taken jobs that put us on the road,” she says. “Everyone told me to travel while she’s young, but they hit a certain age, and they want a life. So we’re stuck—in a good place. There’s a lot of constancy. She’s in such a good place that I don’t worry about the stability of our unit when I have to go back to work.”
Maintaining a happy family life is Williams’s top priority, but the logistics aren’t easy. After Ledger died, she and Matilda continued to live in their Boerum Hill townhouse, which was spacious enough for Williams’s mother, sister, brother-in-law and assorted friends to live there on and off. When she finally moved, she found it excruciating to give up the home they had shared with Matilda’s father.
“At that time, I was inconsolable, because I felt, How will he be able to find us? This is where we lived, and he won’t know where we are,” she says, dabbing away tears. “And now I can’t believe I thought that. Maybe what’s making me cry is I feel sad for the person who thought he won’t be able to locate [us].”
She shakes her head. “The past—you might be done with it, but it’s not done with you.”
Leaving that house forced Williams to sacrifice the comforting presence of her extended family. “Everyone dispersed,” she says. Her mother and sister moved to the West Coast, and Williams rented an apartment in Red Hook for herself and Matilda.
But the dislocation brought unexpected benefits. “I got very lucky with this rental building situation,” Williams says. “I didn’t know anyone there, but we’ve made friends. It’s a modern family. I have a best friend next door, and a grandma and grandpa down the hall. There’s Rosie and J.P.—Rosie will see me in the elevator and say, ‘You look tired—you need to take better care of yourself,’ and then bring over a lasagna. And there’s Kate and her daughters. There’s a building ethos of ‘What do you need?’ and ‘What can I do?’ ”
Such support helps Williams handle the inevitable crises of single motherhood. “A sickness can absolutely bring us to our knees,” she says. “Who do I call? Our next-door neighbors—and they’re there in 30 seconds. It really is fantastic.”
Williams doesn’t have a romantic partner at the moment, although she has had several relationships in the past nine years. “I have not gotten married because I have not had a person to whom I would—so I have not let my sense of conformity or duty override my instincts,” she says. “It’s hard to romanticize romance when you’re 36. When you’ve been a parent for 11 years and you’ve done it alone, you don’t have romantic ideals, because you have a practical understanding that you can do it by yourself. The romantic idea of meeting your person and having a storybook family life that looks like the model you grew up with—that doesn’t really exist for me. It’s a little bit difficult to contend with a feeling of failure for not living up to a standard of normal. Sometimes it can feel alienating; at school functions, there’s only two of us single mothers. Everyone else has a partner, so we buddy up. But I have a family; I have the thing you typically get married for. I live in a commune.”
In reality, Williams never had a storybook family life, even as a child. Born in Kalispell, Montana, she was the daughter of a homemaker and a stock and commodities trader who ran and lost two U.S. Senate races as the Republican nominee. When Michelle was 9, the family moved to San Diego, and she began working as an actress in California. At 15, she filed for legal emancipation from her parents so she could circumvent child labor laws while pursuing her acting career. By the time she was 16, she was starring in the television series Dawson’s Creek as Jen Lindley, a wild-child character she once said she understood because both of them grew up “too fast.”
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