Michelle Williams: “Sex is Our Birthright. Our Bodies Were Designed for Pleasure”

When Michelle Williams first listened to Dying for Sex—the acclaimed podcast hosted by Nikki Boyer about the sexual awakening of her terminally ill best friend, Molly—she had a reaction so strong she couldn’t even understand it. “It bowled me over, I was blubbering, I couldn’t explain why it had moved me so much,” Williams tells me. Years later, when she’d officially signed on to star in a limited-series adaptation helmed by Emmy winner Elizabeth Meriwether (The Dropout) and Kim Rosenstock (GLOW), Williams returned to the podcast, expecting to have “a more rational mind with which to discuss it.” Instead? “Again: Blubbering.”

the Emmy winner and five-time Oscar nominee had filmed in several years. Watching her, you can feel a new kind of spark—a performance filled with joyful discovery, even as it faces down a devastating reality.

Dying for Sex examines the way Molly, upon her diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer, decides to live whatever days she has left in pursuit of sexual awakening and pleasure. She leaves her husband (Jay Duplass), investigates her kinks and desires and where they all come from—and doesn’t care what anybody else thinks. The series parallels this journey of unapologetic self-discovery with a profound portrait of female friendship, with Jenny Slate portraying Nikki, who steps in to be Molly’s caretaker.

Williams has built her career on fearless, emotional performances, so perhaps it’s the lightness of Dying for Sex that feels the most radical. That’s no coincidence, as the star reveals in our conversation: She was opening herself up right alongside Molly.

Vanity Fair: You took a few years off acting. Why was this the project to break that streak?

Michelle Williams: Liz and I had originally started talking about this show probably four years ago. It felt like things were getting exciting and we were moving towards committing. Then I got pregnant and we briefly, ridiculously thought maybe we could CG my stomach out the sex scenes, but blocking that would have been very difficult. [Laughs] We gave that up and I had a baby and I was postpartum and then I was nursing and then maybe when he was a year old or something, I called my agent asking, “Whatever happened to that show? Did somebody do it?” I was still thinking about it, and they said no. I was like, “Oh, then it really must be for me.”

You connected very strongly to the original podcast. As you made the show, did you come to better understand why?

One was Molly’s bravery. When you’re playing with children and they build this elaborate thing of Magnetos or Legos or something and it’s taken them so long and they’re really proud of it, and then they just whack it and the whole thing comes crumbling down—they do it without a thought. That’s how they break something down. They don’t take it apart piece by piece; they do a big sweep. You don’t really often do that as an adult, but that’s what she did when she got this terminal diagnosis. She kept one thing and it was her best friend.

This is a real person that we’re talking about. Can you imagine what people thought about what she was doing or what people said? “Oh, Molly is going on some sort of…” She didn’t care what people said. She didn’t care what people thought. She didn’t care what people saw. That’s one of the things that really got me—she rewrote all of the rules.

There’s a real joy that comes through in your performance, in seeing this person come alive. Can you speak to that?

This is a person who wants to experience every sensation, every available pleasure, the most out of everything as a kind of counterbalance to her medical life where things are being done to her, and it’s procedural and it’s uncomfortable. Like when she had a cane and they said, “Is that part of your kink?”—she turned these negatives into positives. The real Molly continued to find ways to explore her sexuality, to feel good about her body even when she was right toward the end of her life. She loved to get beautiful lingerie and would take these really gorgeous pictures of herself, but they would be creatively disguising chemo scars or where her chemo port was. She found ways to continue to love herself.

This is your second limited series, having previously made Fosse/Verdon. What’s attractive to you about the form?

It’s almost my favorite way to work at this point because you get so thoroughly in bed with a character, and you feel like you live a whole life with them. And that feels so rewarding. You feel like you just get a little bit closer, you’re a little bit more down to the bone with them.

Nikki and Molly are two best friends who’ve been together since they were 18 years old and they’ve had all these experiences, and it accordions again at the end. They say that you have that experience before you die—that your life flashes before your eyes. But when you do a limited series, you get that experience as a character. All of those scenes, all of those memories, everything compresses down to this one final moment where you’re saying goodbye to somebody.

Does that make it harder to let go?

Yeah, it’s horrible. But it is great to get up out of a hospital bed, when you’re lying there saying goodbye to people and people are saying goodbye to you and you’re trying to slow your breathing so that they can’t see your chest moving. It is a very exhilarating feeling to stand up and walk out of what is just a set into something that’s just a sound stage to the open air, which is your actual life and to hopefully go forward in good health but with this kind of near-death experience and this weird sort of therapeutic rebirth.

I started when I was so young and I was devastated when the show was over, whatever that thing was that I was working on. I thought that I had a family and I thought that I was going to see them all the time and be in touch with them all the time. I didn’t know that it’s the circus, that people go back to their lives and you literally never hear from them again. I cried for days. I was so bereft that these people wouldn’t be in my life anymore. I still get twinges of that.

In the case of Dawson’s Creek, that was years, right? I’d imagine it was a real family dynamic.

Completely. It’s the people that you’re on screen with and it’s a crew of 120 people that you interact with so closely on a day-to-day basis over either a period of four months or six months or, in that case, years and years. That’s the nice thing about having done this from such an early age. Seeing that some people do stick around and you don’t get to keep the entire cast and crew of 120, but you get to keep a few.

Can you talk about getting to know Jenny Slate? Your chemistry in the show is so rich.

She’s really easy to fall in love with, so watch out—if you talk to her you might fall in love with her and leave your husband and see if you could maybe die by her side, so be very careful. [Laughs] We fell into each other and we have so many overlaps, just like a run-on sentence. That’s our dynamic and our relationship. We bring to it our own experience of our own best friendships that feel so deep in a way that I don’t know how to articulate. You don’t get to see that much, how actually passionate that best-friendship relationship can be. It’s more passionate than people give it credit for. It’s more of a deep love affair that just doesn’t have a sexual component, but it’s a love attachment—not a casual coffee date.

Safe to say, it’s not something you’ve really gotten to play much?

No, not really. Maybe Dick was the last friendship that I got to be a part of. When I would mention Dying for Sex to my best friend, I’d say, “Oh, I’m thinking about doing this show and it’s about a woman who gets a terminal diagnosis, leaves her husband and says to her best friend, I want to die with you,” and they would get misty-eyed. It’s speaking to something that we haven’t quite seen reflected that’s about the way that women love other women. I was like, I should go towards that—it’s striking a chord.

How did you and the production approach the sex scenes in the series?

We used an intimacy coordinator and I hadn’t had experience with that before. What’s great about it is that it’s really working with a choreographer. Like in the dance they’re showing you how to make a more beautiful line or how to land a turn—but the intimacy coordinator can really show you how to give a better blow job. There’s a technique to fake blow jobs in the same way that there’s a technique to time-step. She taught me that.

“Whether or not you feel like you need an intimacy coordinator, your scene partner—of which you have many—might really value it.”

Did you have personal parameters or a level of comfort in what you were exploring sexually onscreen?

Not really. I’m super game. I wasn’t surprised to find myself in a number of different positions. Everybody says, “Oh, the thing about sex scenes is they’re not really that sexy.” And it’s true, they’re not. You’re trying to not rub each other’s makeup off and also trying to block that thing that’s not supposed to be seen and work with the camera angle. Unfortunately or fortunately or whatever, it’s as technical as hitting your mark.

What would you say to other actors who have been a little bit more resistant to intimacy coordinators, as we’ve been hearing lately?

It’s just a shock—it’s a change. I’ve been doing this for a long time and it’s something to get used to. But whether or not you feel like you need an intimacy coordinator, your scene partner—of which you have many—might really value it. They might need privacy around a sensitivity that they have. That is valid and that is the kind of care that an intimacy coordinator can offer. So if it’s not for you, just think it might actually be for somebody else. That makes it extremely worthwhile.

I love this quote of yours, I hope it’s okay if I reflect it back at you for a moment. You said, “All the women I’ve played have taught me about myself and how to expand myself.” I’m curious how this experience continued that for you.

I’ve had to play people who have bigger magnetic fields than I do: Like Mitzi Fabelman or Marilyn. Those really forced some painful growth to project myself further into space, and that’s hard for me. With this, the experience of getting up and walking out of a hospice bed, it really has stayed with me.

I would say Molly’s radical acceptance of what a body wants. She wanted to heal something even though her end was in sight—she didn’t want to go out broken. She had an idea about how to do it and she set herself on this very unusual course. She made it herself, she made it her own, she made it extremely personal. I think about that and about how we can all lean into our intuitions. There’s so much information and so many sources of information and so many things telling you “this is the way to parent” and “this is the way to dress” and “this is the way to” whatever. The thing that gets lost is intuition.

I think about it a lot as it relates to parenting. When I was raising my daughter, there were just a few books, and now there’s so much coming at you about “do it like this, do it like this,” and I’m so glad that I had this experience 20 years ago because I would feel so overwhelmed by all of the options now. This is a very meandering answer, but she just made very personal choices about how to live her life, and that’s so hard to do in this day and age. It runs the risk of humiliation, embarrassment, and gossip.

You mentioned Molly’s radical acceptance of her desires. With whatever you’re comfortable sharing, of course, what did you find particularly inspiring or instructive about that?

Do you mean the sexy stuff?

Sure.

I love Esther Perel, obviously. When I was first introduced to her work, which predates this show, my mind was blown. I had never had to talk about sex like this. I grew up in Montana and San Diego in the ’80s. It was very different. So I had a lot of new information about how we can think differently about sex, about pleasure, about identity—and to think of it as a creative act. Yes, it can create. I just keep thinking, sex is our birthright. Our bodies were designed for pleasure. We’re not robots. Creativity also takes a lot of energy and that’s in short supply for everybody. It’s not like a magic wand or something, but I have been so moved by her work and how she talks about sex throughout your life and that sex that’s not sequestered to childbearing or during childbearing years.

So when this show came along I thought, “Oh wow, this is already chiming with something that I’m personally moved by.” What Liz and I didn’t know before, as two middle-aged white ladies, is: We got to consult with a few professional doms, and what we learned is that this is all happening, ideally, in a safe and ultimately healing context. All these things that come along are jolts of electricity, and they rewire a mass circuitry.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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