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Allison Williams Comes Alive

On a chilly Monday afternoon in November, sequestered in a windowless private dining room at the American Girl Café, which is itself wedged into a windowless basement in midtown’s Rockefeller Plaza, Allison Williams and I are celebrating a birthday. We just aren’t sure whose.

Lit like a Duane Reade and seemingly decorated by a tween inspired by Pinterest photos of corporate break rooms, the space is mostly empty except for two American Girl dolls in little pink high chairs at our table. They are inexplicably set up in a birthday-theme tableau: tiny gifts, party hats, flowers. After Williams and I confirm with each other that it’s neither of our birthdays, we sit down and dutifully put on the pink paper crowns reading CELEBRATE! that have been placed in front of our chairs. Williams stares at the dolls. “What were they doing right before we walked in?” she asks. On a large flat-screen TV, a stop-motion film starring several of the brand’s dolls politely engaging in various wintertime activities plays on a loop.

Our server enters and asks whose birthday we’re celebrating. With sudden gravity and conviction, Williams points at the $115 toy sitting next to her. “It’s this doll’s birthday,” she says with zero traceable irony — traceable being the key word. The server nods kindly at us. Williams then produces the winsome, Ralph Lauren–ad smile that, to a degree, is responsible for her career thus far. It’s a smile she has employed in extreme earnest (as a YouTube singing sensation in her postcollege days, as an impassioned Peter Pan on live TV, and as Kit Snicket in Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events) and as a clever tool of misdirection (in Girls, Get Out, and The Perfection, among others).

“Okay,” the server says. “I’m going to do a little candle for you.”

“Thank you,” says Williams. “We’ll see if she can blow it out.”

Williams and I are lunching at the American Girl Cafe to acknowledge not only the past birth of our inanimate companion, but the imminent birth of her latest movie, M3gan, a horror film about an angelic-looking robot doll who goes on a rather artful murdering spree. Hitting theaters on the now-fraught date of January 6, M3gan is a collaboration between horror megaproducers James Wan and Jason Blum with a screenplay by Akela Cooper, the mind behind 2021’s lunatic parasitic-twin thriller, Malignant. Williams plays Gemma, the murky Frankenstein figure at the film’s center, a brilliant, work-obsessed roboticist at a toy company who is in the midst of creating the titular AI doll (short for Model 3 Generative Android; pronounced like Markle) that is designed to imprint upon, play with, teach, and protect children. After a car accident gives Gemma sole custody of her niece, she decides to test her creation on her new charge — with alarming, HAL 9000–esque consequences.

When the trailer for M3gan dropped in October, the internet instantly latched on to its multitude of Gen-Z dog whistles, which include M3gan pausing mid-murder to hit some TikTok-worthy choreo and catwalking down a dark hallway, sword in hand, to the sounds of Bella Poarch Immediately, Twitter deemed the doll a “gay icon,” cobbling together fan-cam edits set to Britney Spears songs; even Megan Thee Stallion weighed in, tweeting about social media’s previous favorite haunted doll: “Annabelle bitch your OVER.”

From the trailer alone, it isn’t quite clear whether the minds behind M3gan meant for the whole thing to become a campy meme or are offering it up with total sincerity. Williams, who is an executive producer on the film, says the campiness is deliberate: “Making the trailer for this was a very specific process — how do you translate this tone? How do you get M3gan across?”

“And they just get it: to picture her as kind of iconic,” she says of M3gan’s fans. “The memes that they’re making — we can go home, our job is done.”

A tongue-in-cheek, self-aware spirit is concretely established early in the film when Gemma, testing M3gan’s facial expressions for the first time, instructs her to look confused; instead, M3gan puts on a shit-eating grin. “She doesn’t look confused; she looks demented,” says Gemma. Her co-worker shrugs. “It’s your code,” he says. It’s also her face: Williams tells me the doll was designed to resemble her, which is to say a wealthy, Waspy woman with flowing blonde-streaked hair curled gently at the ends and the placidity that comes with belonging everywhere.

Photo: Jeff Bark

After Girls, Williams decided to use the audience’s expectations to her advantage. Almost everything she has done since has been a considered exercise in leveraging and subverting the idea of “Allison Williams.” In Get Out, she played Rose, a white-supremacist psychopath disguised as a good girlfriend. Then, once she’d persuaded the moviegoing public to be suspicious of her, she exploited that lack of trust to play Charlotte, a brittle and damaged woman who initially seems like the villain but is later revealed to be a complicated heroine, in Netflix’s The Perfection. “A lesson I learned from going from Girls and Peter Pan to Get Out was, like, Oh, we deployed this thing against the audience — and it worked. People come in wary of me, and that is really cool,” she says. Now, she hopes the sense of her is “‘She does weird, interesting, good stuff. So I don’t know which version of her we’re going to get, but let’s go and see.’”

A horror career was not always the post-Girls plan — she’d dreamed of a classic-leading-lady or even a character-actor life — but the genre is where she finds the most complex roles, those that allow her to both reflect and refract her inescapable toxic-white-girl persona. And though she’s thriving in her unexpected niche, she’s still interested in exploring other roles and genres, like, say, a movie musical. “You have to be really careful,” she says, her eyes widening. “I can very easily get on people’s nerves.”

M3gan is, in one reading, a screw-you to the idea that Williams is synonymous with Marnie, Rose, or Charlotte: Fine, this time, the vengeful psychopath with my face actually is my avatar. The film leaves open the question of Gemma’s intentions, her “goodness,” partly because, Williams confirms, there is already “chatter” of a possible sequel. “I think that the audience reevaluating Gemma as the movie goes on is in the movie’s interest — to be constantly checking in and being like, Am I on her side? Am I not on her side?” I ask if she thinks audiences are doing the same thing with her as a public figure. “I don’t know,” she says slowly. “Yeah, maybe. Totally.”

In her personal life, Williams is similarly, albeit unintentionally, dismantling her Marnie-ness: In 2019, she fell in love with her co-star Alexander Dreymon on the set of the poorly reviewed action-thriller Horizon Line, a film that saw her playing yet another “unlikable” white woman, this time a tourist who gets in over her head in Mauritius. Williams porced her first husband, had a son with Dreymon, and got engaged, seemingly in that order, though she won’t really get into it. She says she hasn’t seen her Girls castmates in years, though she’d happily show up to a reunion. After our interview, she’ll fly to Toronto, where she’s playing, naturally, the daughter of a prominent U.S. Senator in Showtime’s 1950s-set limited series Future Travelers. “I am blissfully happy in my life, and the idea of talking about that, it brings me a ton of joy,” she says, quite literally turning pink when she talks about her new fiancé. “But it also makes me feel panicked. In another life, I’d bore you to tears with my own bliss.”

Our server returns with lemon sorbet and a candle. “Let me close the door,” he says ominously. “We’re going to sing.” He lights the candle, sticks it into the sorbet, and places it in front of us with an expectant look. “Who are we singing to?” he asks. Not missing a beat, Williams points to her still-unnamed doll. “Audrey,” she says. “We’re singing to Audrey.” She and the server immediately launch into a cheerful rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and I join in once I realize I’m the only one feeling even remotely self-conscious. When the song ends, I stare at Audrey, unsure of what to do. Williams, still smiling, picks up the sorbet and blows out Audrey’s tiny candle.

Production Credits

• Photographs by Jeff Bark
• Styling by Roberto Johnson
• Dress: Laura Ashley x Batsheva Devon Dress in Rhian Daisy, available at batsheva.com.
• Tights: Coach White Stockings, similar styles available on coach.com and at select Coach stores.
• Earrings:Jennifer Fisher Triple Lilly Huggie Hoops, available at jenniferfisherjewelry.com.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 2, 2023, issue of New York Magazine.

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