Allison Williams Had The Best Response When Asked To Name Redeeming Qualities About M3GAN
"All of the iterations of M3GAN's dance have been hilarious," Allison Williams told me over a Zoom call last month. Like the rest of us, Allison, who stars as Gemma in M3GAN, could not escape the memes after the trailer dropped. The sci-fi horror/comedy film immediately became a viral sensation thanks to its titular character, M3GAN, a well-dressed, artificially intelligent doll turned killer.
As if that weren't enough to draw viewers to the box office, the movie is receiving rave reviews, proving that it more than lives up to its memeable hype. Keep reading to see what Allison says are M3GAN's redeeming qualities, what she learned about AI while prepping for this role, and who would win in a three-way battle of the evilest dolls: Chucky, Annabelle, or M3GAN.
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What are five things someone would need in order to survive a creepy doll that wants to kill them?
Allison Williams: "Number one is have a sharp object. Number two is have access to the cloud. Number three is know if there is a hard off switch button — or a lever — anywhere on the doll. Number four is have a car or a mode of transportation [Laughs]. And number five is be a genius at programming because that would probably help. I'm being a little specific to our doll. But there you have it."
Can you think of four qualities about M3GAN that are actually redeeming?
"She is very loyal. She is. She's a good diagnostician and analyst of vital signs. She is watchful, and she is a gifted performer."
What three things did you learn about artificial intelligence while preparing to play a roboticist?
"One of them is that people who work in AI are much slower to anthropomorphize or humanize AI than the rest of us are. The other I learned is that the technology we're farthest from, in terms of making progress, if you were going to try to make a M3GAN, is her motion, her movement, and her ability to walk spontaneously.
The other thing I learned is the ethics conversation around AI. It's much deeper and prevalent in the AI community, I would say. One of the things they talk about a lot, that the rest of us don't really, is what is our responsibility to anything that we create that has artificial intelligence, rather than what is their responsibility to serve us? What is our responsibility having brought them online?
Anything that risks sentience, or self-awareness, that is something that people [in the AI community] think and talk about a lot, which is an idea that kind of makes my brain hurt, but it's one that we should all think about."
Can you share two memes you saw about M3GAN that made you laugh?
"One of them I just saw the other day, which someone reposted. I have no idea why [they reposted it], maybe because it was the 10-year — it was some kind of milestone of this walk. I remember seeing photos of it with Taylor Swift and Harry Styles in New York City, like a million years ago. And in some of the photos, she's holding a baby, I do not know who this baby is. In the comments, people were like, 'What happened to that baby?' and someone responded with just a photo of M3GAN, which really made me laugh. As if somehow that baby grew up to be M3GAN. That is one that made me laugh really hard.
And then just all of the iterations of M3GAN's dance have been hilarious. The flip is so challenging, and people have gotten around it in ways that have made me laugh so, so hard. Mostly it's like very clumsy cartwheels or just some kind of like rolling like a bug on the ground. Either way, no matter how you do it, it's funny to me."
If you had to choose, which one character is scarier: M3GAN the murderous doll or your creepy character, Rose, in Get Out?
"Rose. She's like a mass murdering white supremacist, evilest of all evil. M3GAN, for all she is, she is not that in my book. Rose kind of takes the cake."
Fair! OK, lastly, let’s settle it once and for all: who would win in a three-way battle: Chucky, Annabelle, or M3GAN?
"Easy, M3GAN. Here's the advantage M3GAN has: She can read their Wikipedia! [Laughs] She's got the World Wide Web in her little CPU. There's nothing she can't research, learn, etc. And [in the movie], we establish that she's very strong and very capable. So, unfortunately for any matchup, M3GAN's kind of got them beat."
