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If you had wandered the set of the film M3gan 2.0 last year, chances are you would have stumbled into M3gan, the terrifying humanoid doll, staring lifelessly while she waited to be called for her next scene. Sometimes she would stand in the corner of the soundstage, says Allison Williams with a nervy laugh. “The dilemma is: do you turn her around so she’s facing the wall, or do you let her face the room? Both answers are wrong.”
In the sequel to the sci-fi horror M3gan, Williams resumes her role as Gemma, a roboticist who has become a crusader against rampant and reckless AI development after her creation – developed for her orphaned niece – became murderous. (She is also a producer on the second film.)
Acting opposite M3gan was unsettling, says Williams, speaking over a video call from a hotel room in New York. Sometimes she was played by the 15-year-old dancer Amie Donald, but often she was a robotic doll, animated by a small team. “When she’s been working for a while, her eyelids can get sticky,” says Williams. M3gan’s handlers would paint lubricant on to her eyeballs with a brush and Williams would have to catch herself: “She’s not flinching and for a second you’re like: ‘Ugh.’ Then you remember: this is not a live thing.”
Still best known for her first role as Marnie in Lena Dunham’s landmark TV series Girls, Williams has gravitated towards comedy-tinged horror in recent years. Her first post-Girls film role was in the Oscar-winning dark comedy horror Get Out. It and M3gan were relatively low-budget projects that became cultural phenomena – Get Out for its commentary on racial politics, M3gan for what it says about the dangers of AI (as well as the uncanniness of M3gan herself).
Williams has long been interested in AI – she knows Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, who put her in touch with robotics experts when she was researching the role of Gemma. The film raises questions not only about the danger of rogue AI, but about the ethical concerns –including how we should feel about the “rights” of devices. “It’s easy to imbue anything that has AI in it with humanity. Like our little robot vacuum we have at our house; I often feel it’s doing all this labour and being overlooked.”
Does she worry that her job will be taken by AI in the not-too-distant future? She laughs. “If you ask me any question that starts with: ‘Are you worried?’ the answer is always yes, because I have an endless capacity to be worried about things.”
But it’s possible, she says, that humans in acting, or any other job, are not special or unique and that “we will all be seamlessly replaced. But so far, especially in the arts, I haven’t yet had an experience that’s supposed to mimic a human output that has felt seamlessly human to me – and who knows if that’s going to be true for ever. For now, it’s towards the bottom of the list of things I worry about.” She smiles. “But it’s not not on the list of things I worry about.”
M3gan raises questions about the tech to which we expose our children. “You wouldn’t give your child cocaine,” says Gemma in M3gan 2.0. “Why would you give them a smartphone?” Williams’ son is three and she is wary of it. “He has so many questions and they’re incredible; I often don’t know the answers.” The other day, she says, she used ChatGPT to answer one about rocket launches. “Watching what happened to his face was like when Gemma sees her niece interacting with M3gan. Like, I have connected my kid to a drug, this is so immediately addictive and intoxicating.” She quickly put her phone away and made a mental note to go to the library next time to get out a book. “I can’t justify it, logically,” she says. “It just felt like an innate instinct.”
Parenting is the central theme of the new podcast Williams launched this month with two friends, Hope Kremer, an early childhood educator, and Jaymie Oppenheim, a therapist. It came out of a group chat in which just about everything to do with motherhood, ageing and life in general was discussed. A future episode is about the guilt many mothers feel, which is also a theme in M3gan 2.0. Will our expectations of mothers ever change? “Oh God, I hope so,” says Williams. “The guilt, I think, is most potent in the absence of a community where you can voice the things that you feel guilt about. I think the guilt around what kind of parent we all are is something that only survives as long as we hold each other to insane standards and expectations.”
She is, she says, “filled with rage about the majority of Instagram and TikTok ‘mom content’ – the aspirational version of it, anyway. I think it’s poisonous [and] it really only exists to make people feel bad about themselves, maybe under the guise of wanting to motivate people, but the impact is so painful.”
She laughs as she describes the dishonesty of an influencer making a perfect packed lunch, filled with nutritious food – because it’s actually 4pm, perhaps, or because they have nannies – that makes other parents, primarily mothers, feel as if they are failing. “I would be in a puddle on the ground if we didn’t have the nanny that we have, who is the reason my husband is shooting in London right now and I’m here,” says Williams. “None of this is possible without her, and we’re so grateful. I’m just like, show your work. Show me a clock. Like, what day was this filmed?” She is laughing, but she is on a roll. “I cannot stand artifice about creating an expectation of what someone should be able to achieve that is totally unreasonable. Who is that helping?”
On another episode, she says, they discuss ageing and unrealistic beauty standards: “I talk about my love for Botox when I’m not filming, because, you know, you need to make facial expressions when you’re shooting.” She laughs. “But, right now, there’s not a ton I can do with my forehead. But the idea that someone would look at me and be, like: ‘I should be capable of that forehead.’ No, you shouldn’t! I’m not better than you because I have no wrinkles there, I just paid to put chemicals in my face. Let’s be real about this.”
I always think it’s quite an achievement for famous people to hang on to pre-fame friends, once acclaim and money start getting in the way. Is it important to have “normal” friends? “I don’t walk the world and feel like a celebrity,” says Williams. “I think I did in my 20s, shooting and living in New York. But that isn’t how I feel dropping our son off at preschool; I feel like a person among people. My job is public, and that’s unique and weird, and our culture thinks it’s more important than other jobs, for sure. But, in our friend group, we celebrate what everyone’s up to and that has been such a stable, steady source of nourishment in my life.”
Williams noticed recently that her son is about the same age she was when she realised acting could be a job and that she might one day do it (his father, Alexander Dreymon, is also an actor; Williams and Dreymon met on the 2020 thriller Horizon Line). She watched bits of The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins and it dawned on her that the woman in both films was the same. “Julie Andrews was like a goddess to me,” she says.
Her parents, the former NBC news anchor Brian Williams and the producer Jane Stoddard Williams, insisted she get an education, which she did (English at Yale), rather than become a child actor. “I’m grateful that my parents didn’t cave and that I didn’t make my way into this business any sooner than I did, because already, at 23, when Girls came out, that was a lot to process.”
In a way, Williams had the reverse experience – her parent was famous. At a time before media was so fragmented, being an NBC news anchor meant Brian Williams reached millions of people. His reputation took a battering in 2015, when it was revealed he had embellished – mistakenly, he said – a story about being shot down in a helicopter while covering the Iraq war. He was suspended for six months and left NBC shortly after.
What was that like to go through as a family? “Anything that feels loud, like people are talking about you and all of that, is horrible,” says Williams. “I think it’s the underbelly of the media – it happens all the time, they eat their own. Everything just goes back to its fundamental priorities – family, friends, people who matter.”
In the recent criticism of nepo babies, Williams has always been admirably upfront and unguarded about her advantages. “Aside from all the many layers of privilege, high on the list is the fact that I could pursue a career in acting without being worried that I wasn’t going to be able to feed myself. I had been surrounded by people who did what I wanted to do.” It didn’t seem like an unreachable dream when Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, were family friends. When she was still at high school, she got a summer job as a production assistant on Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion and got to be around its starry ensemble cast, which included Meryl Streep. “Having had that experience gives you a leg-up when finally it’s your turn and you have to know how to be on a set and how it all works.”
Gratitude seems to be a defining theme in Williams’ life. She is happy she is not starting out now. There was huge hype around Girls during its six-year run, which ended in 2017, but she can’t imagine what that would be like with social media now. (Williams came off Instagram in 2020 – a time, she felt, when the platform was becoming more cynical and toxic.) It was, she says, as if there were “a gazillion think pieces about every episode that we did – and most thought we all took ourselves too seriously. We were all pretty privileged people who were the leads of this HBO show that was definitely skewering our own, but we weren’t given credit for that, or for being in on it.”
Some of the criticism was valid – it was set in New York, yet was overwhelmingly white – but much of it was misogynistic and more. “The shame is that, when it is coupled with misogyny and fatphobia and everything, the valid criticism gets lost.” Some of the coverage was so mean, she says with a laugh, especially on Gawker, which didn’t describe the lead characters by their names, but as the daughters of the famous parent each actor had. “We were easy targets, I get it.”
For a while, Williams struggled with people assuming she was inseparable from her character, Marnie, a narcissist verging on sociopathy. “I really desired to put distance between us, because I thought that was the kind of acting everybody respected – like, I’m wearing a prosthetic nose and I gained 40lbs, or whatever. And here [our characters] were, who looked basically like we looked and sounded like we sounded, but crucially said and did things that we would never do. It always felt weird that, since we didn’t transform ourselves in some way, people weren’t buying us playing characters.”
Mostly though, she says, it was an amazing experience. Will there be a reunion? “I would love it,” says Williams. “I know that Zosia [Mamet, who played Shoshanna] has been pushing for a spin-off, which I would voraciously consume and try to elbow my way into. I kind of want us all back together. It was so fun and it was the beginning of my career, so I didn’t have the perspective I have now on just how lucky we were, or to know how unusual a creative experience it was.”
For those of us who loved Girls, I can think of nothing better – four hilarious, horrendous humans, no scary AI doll in sight.
