Michelle Williams: I Thought About Quitting Acting, But What I Wanted to Quit Was Attention
With a fourth Oscar nod coming any minute, Michelle Williams has the cred, the taste (both in roles and clothes), and the talent. So what's new? Freedom.
In ELLE's January issue, on newsstands everywhere December 13, the actress opens up about growing up on Dawson's Creek, grieving for Heath Ledger, and life in Brooklyn's "backwater."
Here, a sneak peek at the cover story photographed by Terry Tsiolis, styled by Samira Nasr, and written by Boris Kachka.
How the tabloid onslaught made it impossible to experience an authentic life:
"If you feel like people are watching you, it's impossible to have an authentic experience of being alive," Williams says. "There's a performative aspect and a guardedness, and that's just death. I don't know how to live like that, and I don't know how to give a life to my child like that."
On the inspiration that drove her Oscar-worthy performance in Manchester by the Sea:
"Everybody talks about the silences in movies and how interesting they are but it's a lot easier than connecting beat to beat, line to line, inside of a scene in real time in front of a thousand people. But when I went to make [Manchester by the Sea], I felt a little bit more freedom, more access inside of myself."
On how she's naturally open but learned to set boundaries for herself:
"It's not naturally my inclination to be a boundary draw-er," she says, shutting her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose. "I'm like, 'Open up all the doors and the windows and let everybody in.' That's the aim of my work, too." But this isn't acting. "It's been a really, really long time since I've been in an interview. But I have better boundaries now. I feel less susceptible to emotional wreck-diving to come up with explanations for everything."
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