By Lynn Hirschberg
Photographed by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin
Styled by Lori Goldstein
October 2010
Lynn Hirschberg: Michelle, you’re in Toronto making a movie called Take This Waltz, with Seth Rogen and directed by Sarah Polley.
Michelle Williams: I spent the day in a chlorinated pool in my bathing suit. On Friday I’m getting naked with a group of women—all ages, shapes, and sizes—in a YMCA locker room. I have the usual self-loathing and body issues, and yet I seem to be naked in a lot of movies. The nudity has to end somewhere [Laughs]. It would be really nice if the pictures did not get posted online. But then maybe that’s a reason to do it: Just get naked, and who cares if it ends up on the Internet.
LH: Do you spend a lot of time online?
MW: I actively stay away from reading about myself. But I am a slave to my computer. I don’t think that’s good—would Tolstoy even have written Anna Karenina if there were an Internet? I hate myself when I e-mail. E-mail is like a dopamine hit—you wait for it and then you get it. I gave up my computer during my last movie, Meek’s Cutoff, which is a period piece about a woman on the Oregon Trail. I took to letter writing. My girlfriends got some great letters. But when it ended I was back on e-mail. I’m an addict.
LH: In Blue Valentine, out December 31, you and Ryan Gosling have an extremely raw and very naked sex scene.
MW: We never rehearsed anything, and those were really dark days. We shot the beginning of our relationship first, and it was fun and alive. Then we did the sex scenes and it was…toxic. Ryan and I had stopped relating to each other as Ryan and Michelle. Those scenes took forever. I had a long drive from set to home each night, and I would roll down all the windows and turn up the music as loud as I could and hang my head out the window like a dog and scream. It was my escape.
LH
id you get nervous during those scenes?
MW: When I work I’m not nervous. Work is this fabulous free zone. There’s no judgment. My problems arrive when I’m not working. At a photo shoot, for instance, I feel like a sham. I feel like they’re trying to cover up what’s wrong with me. It’s probably not true, but just my dirty mind at work.
LH: During the acclaim and Oscar nomination for Brokeback Mountain, did you have a difficult time?
MW: I was frozen. You’re supposed to take advantage of a nomination and the offers that come your way, but I said no to everything. I finally said yes to I’m Not There, which was directed by Todd Haynes. I played a character like Edie Sedgwick, the Warhol superstar. She was overt and sexual and confident, and that was different for me. It was a small part, but a big deal for me.
LH: You’ve acted since you were a child—you’d think it would be second nature to play any character.
MW: I was 10 when I started getting paid to act. I moved to L.A. when I was 15 and I got emancipated from my parents. I thought I knew everything at 15 [Laughs]. That feels a million miles away—I don’t feel I’m the same person anymore.
LH: You were cast in Dawson’s Creek almost immediately after you arrived in L.A. I’ve always believed that being in a successful TV show affords young actors a financial cushion that allows them to do interesting work.
MW: Absolutely. Dawson’s Creek allowed me to make choices based only on desire. I was so lucky to get Dawson’s. I was auditioning for pilots twice a day. You get used to a rhythm of rejection. But auditioning taught me to change my clothes really fast. To this day I can get in and out of my bra and panties faster than anyone [Laughs].
Dawson’s probably saved my life. I did it for six and a half years, and it gave me financial security. A project like Blue Valentine took years to get off the ground, and I was able to stick with it. I first read the script when I was 21, 22, and it became my reason for being for the longest time. When I ran into Ryan [Gosling], he said, “What about that movie?” I was surprised; I thought Blue Valentine existed only in my head. Until he said that, I was worried it wasn’t quite as good as I had thought. He validated my reaction.
Filming the movie was like being in a kind of bubble. Making Blue Valentine made me feel like I could quit. That’s the story you tell yourself to remind yourself that you have options.
LH: If you quit acting, what else would you do?
MW: That’s the problem: I profoundly don’t know how to do anything else. Except…I could be a pie baker. I like to bake a blackberry pie. I am pretty proud of my pie skills. Pie could be my future.
