Allison Williams Hasn't Googled Herself in Four Years
It's funny that Allison Williams stars on the quintessential show about twenty-something angst and quarter-life crises. Armed with Brooke Shields looks and a Yale diploma, this is one 25-year-old who couldn't have it more together
As Marnie, the most straight-and-narrow girl on Girls, Williams has gamely played against her looks, whether with awkward, contortive sex scenes or a painfully protracted performance of Kanye West’s “Stronger.” On a show that puts its cast through a spectrum of embarrassments, she endures some of the hardest pratfalls. “I think the pleasure in seeing Marnie taken down is that her character is so type A and so desperate to control the flow of life but can’t. It’s a lesson she never learns,” says creator Lena Dunham. As for how her co-star takes the knocks: “Allison couldn’t be more game—she’s like a Fear Factor contestant.”
Williams, of course, is the daughter of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. But she has said that her mother, Jane Stoddard Williams, host of the radio show Bloomberg EDU, “is the real brains of the operation. My dad would be the first to tell you that.” Growing up in New Canaan, Connecticut, she attended private girls’ school Greenwich Academy, then packed off to Yale. One night, after botching a tryout for, of all things, the on-campus production of the musical Urinetown, a friend took her to an improv show to cheer her up. She was hooked, eventually joining the campus troupe Just Add Water and later making a series of YouTube videos—of, for instance, Williams warbling Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” like a ballad—that went viral and eventually got the attention of Girls producer Judd Apatow. (Jokes family friend Seth Meyers, “Those videos she was doing in college were slightly more professional than about half of the stuff we were doing at SNL.”)
At her Girls audition, she and Dunham were asked to improvise a fight. “A lot of the other actresses got into huge blowouts and stormed out of the room,” Williams says. “But because of my improv training, I was like, we have to resolve this conflict.” Dunham was impressed. “She came utterly prepared but also wasn’t afraid to play. She had a confidence and a wit that is rare. And she didn’t play to her beauty.”
Some question Dunham’s motives in regularly debasing Marnie. Is there something funnier—or more darkly satisfying—about watching the pretty girl make a fool of herself? Williams’ response, in essence: puh-lease. “The women that are killing it in comedy these days, some are gorgeous, some aren’t,” she says. “There’s that thing that makes people funny or not, and that, thank God, seems to be the most important currency.” (Williams’ own sense of humor is, according to co-star Zosia Mamet, “a little bit dark and slightly askew.” Dunham describes it as “surprisingly raunchy, despite the fact that she knows a lot of big words.”)
Still, while it’s possible to imagine Dunham having actually suffered some of her show’s humiliations, it’s hard to picture Williams jilted and working as a barista, the way Marnie is in this season’s opener. In real life, Williams has been involved for three years with digital superstar Ricky Van Veen—the type of nerdy-hot guy who sells the comedy site (CollegeHumor) he co-founded as a Wake Forest undergrad to Barry Diller’s IAC for a rumored $20 million. And don’t expect the overshares typical of her generation: Williams is sitting out the social-media revolution. She claims she hasn’t Googled herself in four years.
That would mean she’s missed out on some potshots about her noticeable shrinkage since Girls premiered—though it was noted on-screen, when Marnie’s mother (Rita Wilson) told her she had a big head and a tiny body, like a Macy’s parade float. “When we shot the pilot, I was fresh out of college,” Williams says, shrugging. “I don’t know anyone who looks like they did in college. I was still a little puffy, for lack of a better word. This is just my size, and it has been for four years, but because that was the pilot, that’s how everyone saw me.” For the record, she wouldn’t starve herself to suit a director. “If it’s for a role, absolutely, but if someone said, ‘You could lose a couple pounds,’ I would say, ‘Oh my God, go fuck yourself.’ ”
Perhaps it’s the logical result of growing up with a high-profile parent, but Williams seems uncannily aware of the image she’s crafting—starting with fashion, which she says “is a fun area to educate myself about, and I’m still learning, but it’s a pure extracurricular.” On the red carpet, she has skewed high-end American classic, often in Oscar de la Renta and Ralph Lauren—and that’s no accident. “I wanted to establish a baseline: Here’s what I look like, I have long brown hair, I wear this kind of dress, this is the deal. You can count on it!” The inspiration behind the theory is telling. “Look at Jennifer Aniston: She’s America’s sweetheart for a reason. You know what she’s going to look like when she shows up to something, and there’s something so comfortable about that.”
When we met, Williams was working with a dialect coach before an audition for a film set in seventeenth-century Holland. “I want to play a villain. I want to play a romantic heroine. I want to play someone who’s on heroin,” she says. “There’s nothing I don’t want to do. I want to play a guy at some point. I’ll gain 100 pounds, I’ll cut my hair off, I’ll do whatever. I’m not precious about any of it.” Meyers, for one, envisions her as a future rom-com queen. “You’d want her to play an incredibly intelligent person who thinks she’s smart enough to have her life figured out, but the minute the first thing goes wrong, she kind of falls to pieces,” he says. “That's what’s so great about Allison. She plays intelligence really well, but she also plays the frustration of not having been as smart as she thought she was.”
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