The year of Williams
Venom actress sees changes in #MeToo era
I thought it would be fun to try something on a larger scale and to see if I can relax.” Michelle Williams
LOS ANGELES— Michelle Williams can’t believe it’s been less than a year since “the pay stuff.” Time has seemingly accelerated since last October when, while shooting the comic book movie Venom, the unimaginable began to happen: Titans of her industry started to fall under #MeToo.
Then, months later, after reshoots for All the Money in the World, which were hurriedly completed to remove scenes featuring one of the accused, Kevin Spacey, Williams became the centre of a very public controversy over a vast pay discrepancy between herself and co-star Mark Wahlberg. She was paid less than $1,000 for the reshoots. He got $1.5 million. (All figures in U.S. dollars.)
It’s also a year in which she married musician Phil Elverum, and started making some atypical career choices for a four-time Oscar nominee who has in her adulthood always veered toward art house films of directors such as Kelly Reichardt and away from the commercial, from big budgets and from comic book films like the one she’s promoting.
During a promotional day for her latest film, Venom, Williams cranes her neck performativity to look at the somewhat grotesque poster behind her, half of which is star Tom Hardy’s face, and the other half is the tar-like people-eating alien “symbiote” that he becomes.
“Nope,” she says. “Doesn’t seem like me!”
But Williams is finding she’s ready to take some chances and to bet on herself.
“I’m recognizing my own strength and my own worth. I’m 38 and it’s just happening.”
Plus, she wanted to work with Hardy.
“She’s one of the best actors out there working today,” said Venom director Ruben Fleischer, who worried that she wouldn’t want to do it.
But Williams said she was only flattered by the offer.
“It’s not like people are always asking me to be in these kinds of movies,” Williams said. “I thought it would be fun to try something on a larger scale and to see if I can relax.”
Venom is a character in the Spider-Man comics, and the $100-million film is a part of Sony Pictures’ efforts to create an extended Spider-Man Universe with the Marvel characters it licenses. (Spidey does not appear in Venom.)
Williams plays Anne Weying, the ex-fiancé of Hardy’s Eddie Brock. She made the character her own, from the business-like costumes (some of which she shopped for herself ) down to the dialogue.
“There were certain lines that I felt were too passive or sweet. I wanted to make sure that she could stand her ground,” Williams said, citing the Howard Hawks classic His Girl Friday as inspiration for the dynamic she wanted to convey.
“I wanted it to be unmistakable that it was made in a #MeToo era. I said, ‘I know that you guys won’t let me wear a #MeToo T-shirt, but that’s the vibe that I want.’”
The #MeToo moment and the pay debacle have made Williams reflect on her career and experiences up to this point and what it might mean for her 12-year-old daughter, Matilda Ledger.
“It was really tough when I was younger,” she said. “I didn’t know that I could say no. I didn’t know I could say stop. I just didn’t grow up with any of that language.
“Now, in America, I feel like our daughters are going to grow up with a different understanding of what’s possible, what they’re entitled to.”