Henry Cavill and Elizabeth Debicki in “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”
Jessica Williams is on the rise, with a main role in “People Places Things” opposite Jemaine Clement and Regina Hall after her run on HBO’s “Girls.” Of course, the 25-year-old comic actress is best known for her day job — she was hired 3½ years ago as the youngest correspondent in the history of “The Daily Show.” It’s an affiliation she’s frequently reminded of by sad people she meets.
“It feels like a really long funeral,” she says of longtime host Jon Stewart’s departure earlier this week. “Everybody has been walking up to me on the street, saying, ‘Oh, my God, I’m so sad, I’m in mourning.’ I’m like, ‘He’s not dead.’ They’re like, ‘Please, he could have just given us one more election year.’ ”
Can’t be replaced
Williams is confident the show will continue to be good — the writers and correspondents aren’t leaving — but knows Stewart is irreplaceable … at least to her.
“He’s super-important to me, and I’m just so grateful I’ve gotten to spend time with him as a young comedian,” she says. “He was the first person who took a chance on me. I feel like I owe him so much for him doing that, and for leading by example, and for just being super, super kind and so smart.
“He hired me when I was 22. I had been going to a lot of auditions and people had been saying, ‘You’re interesting. … I don’t know what to do with you.’ Part of it was I was young, I was raw, I was black, I was a woman. By Hollywood standards and comedy standards, I was a risk. Jon took a chance on me.”
Williams grew up in Harbor City, part of Los Angeles. Her formative years were spent in a little suburban pocket not far from the beach, with attentive parents and a love for ’N Sync. Especially Justin Timberlake.
“I heard the voice, I saw the frosted tips; I thought, ‘This is what I am into, romantically, right now.’ ”
Early on, she realized she had a sharp tongue.
“I had a day care teacher. She was my favorite teacher forever. We would always spend time together, but then she started having kids. Selfishly, I said, ‘What about us, what about me?’ She was talking to one of the other teachers and she said, ‘Ooh, I got to stop having all these kids.’ And I said, ‘Well, maybe you should keep your legs closed.’ ” Williams was 6. By the time she attended nearby Cal State Long Beach, her focus was solidly on performing — she was far more invested in the Upright Citizens Brigade and Comedy Sports than in her studies.
She isn’t sure how she came to the attention of “The Daily Show,” whether it was a call a casting agent sent her on or, as she’s told, “They’d seen some of my UCB stuff, like I did this Serena Williams sex tape.
‘Really, really right’
“I told my mom I needed to get a suit: ‘Let’s go to J. Crew.’ And she said, ‘We ain’t got J. Crew money, girl, we goin’ to T.J. Maxx.’ I got this Jones New York suit and flew over; and it was, like, the middle of winter, and I auditioned with Jon, and it all just felt really, really right. It felt like a really good date.”
“The Daily Show” has certainly opened doors for her, leading to the “Girls” gig and now “People Places Things.” In the film, she plays a student in a class for aspiring comic-book storytellers who sets her teacher (Clement) up with her mother (Hall).
“I’m obsessed with Jemaine. I’ve always thought he was really, really funny,” she says of the “Flight of the Conchords” star. “Most of my scenes are with him, so I was so excited to sign on to the project, knowing I would get to work with him.
“He’s so good in the movie. He’s so present. He’s so thoughtful and subtle. He gets every joke, and he makes more jokes. It was really fun to shoot with him.”
Writer-director Jim Strouse would have them do a take on the page, then improv.
“My favorite was when I was asking him to ask her [mother] out” — at first he thinks Williams’ character, Kat, is asking him out — “I’m like, ‘Eww, no, I’m not trying to go out with you.’ Jemaine’s like, ‘Jesus, I’m not the Elephant Man.’ That wasn’t written in there.”
Kat and her mother are black (Clement’s character is white), but race is never mentioned in the film.
“One thing I was drawn to about her was that she existed outside of race. Kat and Diane, the wonderful Regina Hall — those characters could have been any race. That really appealed to me,” she says. “That made Kat a very open space for me to fill. It meant a lot to me that Jim Strouse presented it to me with that in mind. Not a lot of film roles for young black women are like that.”
Williams says she can’t help but be keenly aware of news stories involving racial friction in America.
“There’s a statistic in San Francisco: Black women are arrested way more often than white women.” She looks it up: “‘Black women make up 5.8 percent of San Francisco’s female population, but account for 45.5 percent of all female arrests.’ That’s bananas.
‘Built into the system?’
“Why is it that this keeps happening, especially in police and African American relations? Are we just perceived as more aggressive? Is it built into the system? Where is the breakdown?
“As a 25-year-old black woman, that’s what I think about a lot. It’s fascinating to me, it’s sad to me, and it’s exhausting at this point. It feels like a lot. It’s something I’m thinking about all the time.”