Michelle Williams says ‘nobody cared’ about pay gap
NEW YORK – Michelle Williams is just as obsessed with “Fleabag” as you are. “‘Fleabaaag! Fleabaaaaag!' I think we're all living for ‘Fleabag' at the moment,” says the actress, who's a fan of the Emmy-nominated Amazon comedy. “I haven't even finished the second season, but I just don't even want to. I look forward to accosting (creator/ star Phoebe Waller-Bridge) at the Emmys.”
A four-time Oscar nominee, Williams, 38, earned her first Emmy nods for executive producing and starring in FX miniseries “Fosse/Verdon,” in which she plays Broadway legend Gwen Verdon, the often-overlooked wife and muse of choreographer Bob Fosse. The former “Dawson's Creek” star says she celebrated the honor modestly with Matilda, 13, her daughter with the late Heath Ledger.
“I was somewhere I couldn't check my phone when the news came out, but then I had a lot of messages,” Williams says. “My kid hugged me and said she's proud of me, and nothing really touches that.”
Motherhood is at the center of Williams' new film “After the Wedding” (in theaters in New York and Los Angeles, expanding to 200 theaters nationwide throughout August). She plays Isabel, a reticent manager of an orphanage in India who's summoned to New York by a wealthy benefactor named Theresa (Julianne Moore). But melodrama ensues when Isabel learns that Theresa's daughter Grace (Abby Quinn) is the child she gave up for adoption, and Theresa's husband (Billy Crudup) is her former flame.
The gender-flipped movie is adapted from a 2006 Danish drama of the same name, which was Oscar-nominated for best foreign-language film and centered on two men who learn they share the same daughter and ex. But Williams believes that the female perspective raises the emotional stakes.
“I'm playing somebody who's lived for 20 years with this absence and this mystery,” Williams says. “I did a lot of research because there's a lot of material written by women who have been put in this situation, and they talk about their enduring connection and sadness (over their child).”
As a mom, Williams can sometimes relate to Isabel's feelings of ineptitude as a parent to Grace, whom she reconnects with as an adult.
“Motherhood has sort of reinvented me completely, so the lens that I see the whole world through is as a mother,” Williams said.
In January 2018, USA TODAY broke the news that Williams was paid an $80 per diem totaling less than $1,000 to reshoot scenes in Ridley Scott's “All the Money in the World” after a cascade of sexual misconduct allegations against Kevin Spacey, who was replaced in the film by Christopher Plummer. Her co-star, Mark Wahlberg, earned $1.5 million for the same work.
The shocking pay discrepancy surfaced a few months earlier, but was largely ignored until Williams' friend, Jessica Chastain, resurfaced the news at the onset of the Time's Up movement.
“What was truly interesting was that when it first came out, it hit the news stream and nobody picked it up. Nobody cared,” Williams says. “And that felt like no surprise to me. That just validated everything that I'd experienced in my life up until that point.
“And then the world changed a little bit; there was a shift in our industry,” Williams says. Chastain regenerated interest in the story, which “was less about me than it is about how accomplished women are undervalued . ... Professionally, it's become maybe the most important thing that's ever happened to me, because now I can use it as an example for women in other industries of what income disparity looks like.
Moore applauds Williams' fortitude: “It's not easy to be the center of a storm and the big example, but she handled it really intelligently and gracefully.”