‘I just thought it was the saddest thing’: Oscar-nominee Michelle Williams’ Dawson’s Creek confession
She stars in a new series dubbed the ‘kinkiest show on TV’, now Michelle Williams has opened up about the role that made her famous.
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Michelle Williams has always relied on the support and counsel of her closest girlfriends.
So when she was weighing up whether to play Molly Kochan in the Disney+ drama Dying for Sex, it was that very crew that gave the five-time Oscar nominee guidance.
“I said to them: ‘I’m thinking about doing this show, and it’s about a woman who gets a terminal diagnosis, leaves her husband and says to her best friend, I want to die with you’,” Williams explains.
“My friends would get this faraway look in their eyes, sometimes with a tear, and say, ‘I think you should do that.’”
That’s because Williams has experienced the sort of friendship where “you’ve known each other for a very long time, so you’ve known – and you love – all possible versions of yourselves”.
As such, she understood her character’s desire to spend her final days “with somebody who sees you holistically”.
“So when I saw how many of my female friends were responding to it without really knowing all the details of it, I thought, oh, maybe this is a story worth telling.”
An eight-part drama based on Nikki Boyer’s podcast about supporting her best friend Molly’s journey of self-discovery and sexual awakening while grappling with cancer, Dying for Sex was never going to be for the faint-hearted.
The series deals with sex and death – two potentially fraught topics – with frankness and humour.
And once Williams read the straight-shooting script, she couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“It got its hooks into me early on,” she says, as she recalls reading the pilot episode and listening to Boyer’s podcast five years ago.
“We started talking about it, and I was really interested.
“But then I got pregnant – and making a show like this while pregnant just seemed totally outlandish.”
Production started after Williams welcomed her third child, her second with husband Thomas Kail (she also has a teenage daughter, Matilda, with late partner Heath Ledger).
“So then here we are, all these years later.
“That baby is two and a half years old, and was on set when we were making the show,” she says.
“It was really nice because it’s a show about women, written by women, directed by women, with women spread throughout the cast and crew, and we were able to make a teeny, tiny little room where kids could come visit.
“So I was able to have two of my young children be somewhat a part of the process.”
Having children on set brightened the tougher days of filming. The actress also relied on Dolly Parton’s music for an instant lift.
As she explains, “She’s always been a go-to for me; the voice that I want to hear at times that I need it.”
In fact, Williams fondly recalls auditioning for a role opposite Parton 30 years ago, when she was still a nervous novice.
As she reveals, “She was as warm to me in person as she is in her music for everyone.”
It was in those early years of her career that Williams first had to tap into the complex emotions of facing death, given her character Jen was diagnosed with a fatal heart condition in the final season of Dawson’s Creek.
Although only in her early 20s and not yet a parent, Williams remembers being overwhelmed with emotion when she filmed Jen’s heartbreaking farewell message to her daughter in the 2003 series finale.
She has not been able to watch it since. Still, she recalls, “I couldn’t stop crying. And I don’t know if it was dramatically appropriate or not, but I just thought it was the saddest thing in the entire world.
“So it felt as sad to me then – which is 25 years ago – as it does to me now.”
Dying For Sex streams from Friday on Disney+. For more from Stellar, click here.
Read the full interview with Michelle Williams in the latest issue of The Binge Guide, out tomorrow. Inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD) and Sunday Mail (SA).
Originally published as ‘I just thought it was the saddest thing’: Oscar-nominee Michelle Williams’ Dawson’s Creek confession
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