For those with even a tentative toe online, it was hard to avoid the impact of yassified evil doll turned newly branded “queer icon” M3gan this past week. Ever since she danced her way to virality in the internet-shifting trailer for her self-titled film late last year, she’s never been far from the spotlight, but with the film finally unfurling in US cinemas, she was front and centre, terrorising Twitter and TikTok and sleekly dethroning both Chucky and Annabelle within a weekend.
“I was getting sent a lot of memes,” Allison Williams, the film’s star, tells me over Zoom. “I have a few friends who just sent me everything they see that’s funny and their Twitter algorithms are just like: ‘Oh, I guess you just want non-stop M3gan content.’”
It seems like a great deal of us were craving non-stop M3gan content with the $12m-budgeted horror scaring up an expectation-smashing $30m in its opening weekend and sequel talks already under way. The film, an AI upgrade on the Frankenstein formula that sees Williams’s cocky toy creator grapple with unleashing a malevolent mechanical moppet on the world, also, even more surprisingly given the genre, impressed critics to the tune of a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it “cheekily enjoyable”). “I knew not to have any expectations,” Williams says, the 34-year-old also boasting her first credit as a very hands-on executive producer. “I think that’s kind of all you can ask for when you’re making something that you’re offering to the culture is that some vast corners of it are going to be like, ‘Yes please, thank you, we needed her, we wanted her.’”
Being needed and wanted by the culture isn’t something that Williams herself has always been used to. At 22, she was cast in Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls, an unusually frank, for the time, look at the lives of women in their 20s, daring to show them as messy and horny and difficult, a stark splash of colour added to a world that had previously been shown to us mostly in black and white. It won critical acclaim, a bounty of awards and had a lasting impact on how women’s stories are told, away from the flattened archetypes of network sitcoms. But there was also a pushback, some of it understandable (the show was set in Brooklyn but was universally, aggressively white) but some of it rooted in a murkier misogyny, based around the women’s bodies, their sexual activities and the fact that they were often defiantly unlikable and, to some, not feminist enough (In an op-ed for the New York Times, Frank Bruni sighed: “Gloria Steinem went to the barricades for this?”).
“I was thinking recently, if I was cast on Girls now, what would the experience be for me and I think it would be much more stressful,” she admits. “I didn’t know anything else. I was 22 when I was cast on the show, I was 23 when it came out. We were so young and it was loud in the way of watercooler and thinkpieces and Gawker was, like, obsessed with us and it was the heyday of that kind of thing but I didn’t have any sense of how to calibrate how big any of it really was.”
She says had it been broadcast today, the conversation would be even “louder and meaner” and she would “really struggle with it”. Williams credits the discussion around the show for giving her the ability to sift through the “legitimate from the misogynist”, admitting that the show had a diversity issue but also being cognizant of the less warranted criticisms.
“I think a lot of people look back at their work and what they were writing about Girls now with a little bit of shame,” she says. “It was really also diminishing of our skill. I saw that Taylor Swift was giving an interview recently where she said that people were treating her music like it was a trick, like there wasn’t skill involved and as one of the great living songwriters, I don’t know how that is possible but I do know that is how it also felt probably for Lena, that people thought it was just some accident that she was writing these episodes or something.”
Six seasons and 62 episodes of Williams playing Marnie, a staggeringly self-centered narcissist with a penchant for mortifyingly uncomfortable moments of public singing, meant that too many people directly associated her with the character. It’s a truly fantastic, empathetic, comic creation and one that’s written and performed with complete self-awareness, something that was often misunderstood. As the show came to an end, Williams was weighing up what would come next while also keenly aware of how she was perceived: as clueless and as neurotic and as embarrassing as Marnie. Early on during her time on the show, she made the offbeat decision to star as Peter Pan in a live, all-singing TV special opposite Christopher Walken, which was weirdly the kind of showy, spotlight-grabbing thing that Marnie might have chosen to do. But it was something that also grabbed the attention of Jordan Peele, busy casting his debut film as writer-director, the darkly comic horror Get Out.
“I feel like everything happened the way it needed to” she said, expressing deep gratitude for Peele for casting her in his Oscar-winning phenomenon. “I learned that this element of Marnie-ness that I was having so much trouble shaking was something that I could actually use and weaponise and have fun with. It was so cathartic after years of people being like, that’s who you are, that’s who you are, that’s who you are, I was like OK, you know who else that is? That could also be the most evil person that’s ever lived.”
Williams is happy to have “lost all sense of good will” from audiences and since luring black people to their deaths in the 2017 smash, she also toyed with expectations in 2019’s gonzo Netflix horror The Perfection where she makes a rival cellist of colour cut off her hand before – spoiler – we find out that she’s more friend than foe and the story is less about racism and more about the trauma of sexual abuse. Her next film, survival thriller Horizon Line, was a bit of a misstep but it did introduce Williams to her fiance, the German actor and model Alexander Dreymon. The pair welcomed a son in 2021 (“When people say it changes everything they’re not being glib, it literally changes everything,” she says, of motherhood).
In M3gan (which stands for Model 3 Generative Android, don’t you know), Williams plays with the notion of what we’ve now come to expect of her – potentially sinister, mostly unknowable white woman of privilege making chaotic decisions – and has fun with it, not quite as much as her meme magnet co-star, but it’s more deft work from an actor slowly gaining deserved recognition. Her most recent press tour for M3gan also led to plaudits for how she has handled the dreaded nepo baby discourse.
It had been brewing for months earlier (partly spurred by the shock realisation that Euphoria’s Maude Apatow is, yup, Judd Apatow’s daughter) but when New York magazine published a string of articles about the year of the nepo baby (a celebrity with famous or at least well-connected parents), the internet briefly pushed the M3gan dance to the side and obsessed over this instead. Williams, the daughter of the long-serving NBC anchor Brian Williams and TV producer Jane Gillan Stoddard, was then asked inevitable questions of fairness and privilege. In an interview with Wired, she said: “It doesn’t feel like a loss to admit it. If you trust your own skill, I think it becomes very simple to acknowledge.”
Enthused headlines soon followed – “Why Allison Williams has the best ‘nepo baby’ comeback”, “Allison Williams Has the Correct Response to the ‘Nepo Babies’ Discourse” – and while, to the outside observer, all she really did was state the obvious, her comments came after other nepo babies had responded on the defence. Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny Depp, called it sexist and said that when it comes to acting, “nothing is going to get you the part except for being right for the part”. Zoe Kravitz, daughter of Lenny Kravitz, said that it’s “completely normal for people to be in the family business”. Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, wrote on Instagram that the conversation is “designed to try to diminish and denigrate”.
I mention that her comments had been well-received (“Wow, I have not seen those links!” she replies) but wonder if she can understand where the other, less open, celebrity reactions might be coming from.
“I understand every part of it,” she says. “I think partially because I’ve also been talking about this for like a decade. When Girls came out, I think it was Gawker that only referred to us by our parents so it would be like Brian Williams’s daughter is in this scene with David Mamet’s daughter and blah blah blah and so we just got used to it. One of my first big magazine covers didn’t even put my first name, or my name on the cover at all. It just said Brian Williams’s daughter and so I got used to being seen in that way.”
She has “compassion” for responses that are less heralded by the internet and credits the “quieter stage of media” that existed when she initially had to talk about it and admits that she too initially bristled at people assuming she got work because of her family, rather than being talented. “That made me feel really defensive because the subtext of that is you’re not very good. And now as an older person who’s been at this longer, I feel like I know there are people who don’t think that I’m good” she laughs. “I’m not for everybody and so letting go of that means it’s much easier for me to also say if you also are wondering that perhaps my relationships helped me get in the door and get me to where I am then the answer is 100% yes and I don’t feel like I’m losing anything by admitting that. It’s totally unfair in a way that’s maddening so to be told that it’s not real and it’s not happening, is just gaslighting.”
She’a also aware of being a parent of a nepo baby and wants her son to grow up with the same attitude about privilege. “I think that if I can give him that same sense of gratitude and responsibility and awareness that everything’s just going to be that little bit easier for him then I would feel like I’ve done my job,” she says. “I feel a great responsibility to not raise an asshole. We don’t need more. We’re good.”
For Williams, moving from her 20s into her 30s in a far louder digital landscape led her to change the way she deals with the internet. She quit Instagram in 2020, labelling it “poisonous”, and while M3gan memes might have provided her with an unusually positive new chapter in social media discourse, she’s happily staying away – or at least staying away-ish. “I’m a lurker on all of the platforms,” she admits. “I’m not proud of it. It feels like kind of wimpy to just consume rather than offer anything in exchange. All of those places can be really negative and mean, let alone meanness that’s coming from bots and not necessarily real people, and I wish I had the kind of constitution where it was like Teflon and it just bounced off of me and I know some people are but I’m just not, I remember all of it forever.”
For someone who made a horror film that found success on social media, she likes neither social media nor horror films all that much. M3gan is a PG-13, which she finds more “palatable”, the violence mostly implied rather than shown, but she teases that in the not-so-distant future we’ll get to enjoy it in its gorier form. We’re also likely to see M3gan in countless, as-yet-unconfirmed sequels. “Even the way we titled the movie, like, M3gan, Model 3 Generative Android, it’s sort of like a threequel so what do we do from there?” she says. “I have been feverishly jotting down stuff that I think would be fun to address in future movies.”
Last year, Dunham also admitted to “informally” pitching an And Just Like That-style reboot of Girls, bringing the characters back to HBO. She still speaks to her co-stars at least virtually (“I talked to Lena a few days ago, she’s the person I’m most in touch with,” she tells me), is intrigued by the idea and “can only imagine how brilliant it would be” if Dunham was able to write them all with even more perspective. But where would Marnie be? “I think she’s probably still on a search, a quest for identity for meaning,” she says. “I think she’s probably got two more engagements, one more marriage because she tethers herself to people really easily. And she probably makes purses and she’s doing open mics on the side.”
M3gan is out in US and UK cinemas now