🎧 Michelle Williams on Producing With Empathy — and ‘Dying for Sex’
The five-time Oscar nominee on her dual role as star and EP, reimagining the audition process and finding humanity in a life-and-death story
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Michelle Williams knows what she wants her sets to feel like, and she’s had a long time to figure it out. The Emmy winner started her acting career as a teenager and has made everything from Oscar-nominated classics like Brokeback Mountain and Manchester by the Sea (earning five acting nominations herself in the process, including for both of those movies) to action spectacles (like, yes, seriously, Venom). She knows more or less every version of what a film or TV set can be like.
Which is why it’s so surprising, to me at least, that Williams has been credited as an executive producer only three times: First on the 2010 feature Blue Valentine, then on her Emmy-nominated limited series FX’s Fosse/Verdon (2019) and now on this year’s Dying For Sex, also on FX. Combined, the shows have netted Williams four Emmy nominations and a best actress victory for Fosse/Verdon — one she could replicate next month at the Emmys.
“In some ways, it can be so healing when you get to have the opposite experience of what you’re used to,” Williams, 44, tells me on this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. She’s talking specifically about the process of auditioning Jenny Slate to play her onscreen best friend in the series. “I’m very used to sitting in Jenny’s chair. I know what that feels like. So now, if I’m in this chair, how can I build a better room? How can I build a room that I would have liked to walk into when I was auditioning?”
Dying for Sex, one of my absolute favorite shows of the year, features one of Williams’ all-time great performances, which is really saying something. Based on a true story and the Wondery podcast that emerged from it, the show follows Williams’ Molly as she responds to a terminal cancer diagnosis by going on a major journey of sexual discovery — and leaning on her best friend, played by Slate, in the process.
It was a role that required Williams to work for the first time with an intimacy coordinator, a job she compared to an “on-set therapist.” I asked her about that process, what surprised and even shocked her about the show and what it means to finally have power behind the scenes.
Hear all that and much more on today’s episode of the podcast, which also includes part 3 of our fall preview series. David Sims returns to join me and break down the major studios’ Oscar hopes, which begin with Warner Bros. hit Sinners but certainly don’t end there. As a reminder, paid subscribers to Prestige Junkie After Party can watch the full video version of my interview with Williams and the fall preview, plus all of our other podcasts. There’s more, too: Prestige Junkie After Party subscribers gain access to bonus episodes (like the fall festival draft happening on Friday; you don’t want to miss it), Substack Lives, call-in shows and much more. Join us!
