On HBO’s Girls, though, the main characters stumble through their 20s in a haze of awkward sex, unstable jobs and explosive friendships. In comparison, reading while walking might as well be a stroll in the park. "I think it’s very specific and honest and often it’s hard to watch," says Williams, who plays put-together Marnie Michaels, a privileged college grad and uptight gallery assistant in New York. Dangling on the precipice between intimate ingénue and sexual sage, she loses both her boyfriend and best friend in Season 1. "It’s grounded in reality and the opposite of whatever aspirational stuff is out there. Sometimes it’s like looking into a very, very harsh mirror with bad lighting, like one of those funhouse mirrors."
Filming the notorious sex scenes — like one in which Marnie enjoys a moment by herself after meeting a boy — is just the opposite, an easy collaboration with the crew, but it didn’t start out that way. "The first shot ever of me in Girls was with no makeup, when I was waking up with a retainer in my mouth and my lip trembling," laughs Williams in conversation with Page Six Magazine. By the third episode, however, the lip trembling was of a decidedly more risqué sort, as she slipped a hand down her skirt and got to third base with herself in a bathroom stall.
"I was very nervous about the logistics of it," confesses the actress, whose background is more comedic. "I wanted to know how long it would take, how many takes we would do, what places the camera was going to be in. They’re very goofy, they’re very funny and the only way to get through them is to laugh really hard with each other and just try to enjoy it. I will say that the crew members on our show have gotten to know all of us very well." Williams says the moment was more intimidating because she knew there was going be so much [camera] on her face. "I know that's kind of a weird thing to harp on, but I wanted to make sure that what I conveyed in her face was a whole range of emotions," she says of her solo scene, which sent the Twitterverse chirping. "This was really the first emotionally intimate moment we were going to see of Marnie's, so it felt really important."
Since premiering in April, Girls has been lauded for its realistic-and sometimes graphic-depiction of 20-something women in New York, featuring four female friends on a post-college romp through a post-glamorous city. The groundbreaking series (returning for a second season on January 13) details the thoroughly modern, thoroughly excruciating encounters of its young leading ladies, from breaking up with a boyfriend midcoitus on a loft bed to facedown sex on a shabby Greenpoint couch. "It's that phase where women are coming into their own sexuality, and they're trying to decide who they are and what they want and what they feel comfortable doing," Williams observes, blinking her heavily kohled bedroom eyes. "And to me, that is a very important and also rarely touched upon phase of life."
Amazingly, given the show's provocative content and unusually direct focus on the sex lives of young women, Williams' entire family watches. That includes her dad, the revered NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, her mum, Bloomberg Radio host Jane Stoddard Williams, her 21-year-old brother Douglas, a college senior who's planning a career in sports broadcasting, and even her octogenarian grandparents. "My grandparents loved it-my grandfather's about to turn 90, so he can't be shocked anymore!" Williams says with a smile. "My grandmother feels bad for all of us," she adds, referring both to the show's characters and the generation they represent."
Though Williams can’t disclose much about Season 2, she notes that the men will get more of the spotlight and we’ll see the fallout of Jessa’s (Jemima Kirke) surprise wedding, Hannah’s (series creator Lena Dunham) breakup and Shoshanna’s (Zosia Mamet) first time having sex. She also won't reveal whether she'll be shedding her clothes in the upcoming episodes (unlike the perpetually disrobed Dunham, Williams kept covered last year), but yes, there’ll be more nudity and awkward sex scenes, which she insists she is OK with. "Lena is so genuinely interested in only portraying the truth in this show, and I trust her completely," she says. "So if she says that something is necessary to the character, to the show, then I’m willing to help that cause."
Williams does hint that radical changes are in store for her character. "Marnie's not safe anymore; there are a lot of nets that have been pulled out from underneath her," she states. "You see more of that inner struggle between what it really means to be alone and what it means to be lonely. With a character like Marnie- and she and I certainly have this in common- we like to feel like at any given moment, we are not lost, and have it together," Williams says. "But we clearly may think back on a moment and go, 'Oh my God, I had no idea what was going on.'"
No comments:
Post a Comment