Allison Williams regrets the bronzer she used as a teenager — the quality, the placement. She regrets the black eyeliner repurposed as an eyebrow pencil. “I’ve seen TikToks of people doing nostalgic early 2000s makeup, and it’s too close to home,” she said. “It’s exactly accurate.”
Williams, 37, has since grown up, often onscreen. She played Marnie, a try-hard song-prone protagonist of the pivotal HBO series “Girls,” and then had roles in a series of buzzy horror films: “Get Out,” “The Perfection,” “M3gan” and its sequel. These days her makeup is impeccable.
“Regretting You” (in theaters), the director Josh Boone’s adaptation of the Colleen Hoover novel, put Williams face to face with the teenage version of herself. She plays Morgan, a woman in her 30s who became pregnant at 17. A family tragedy compels her to reassess her life and her relationships with her daughter, Clara (Mckenna Grace), now 16, and an old friend, Jonah (Dave Franco). In flashbacks — with careful lighting and slight de-aging — Williams also plays Morgan as a teen.
On a recent weekday morning, Williams, the daughter of the news anchor Brian Williams and the TV producer Jane Stoddard Williams, looked very much the adult as she strode through the American Museum of Natural History in coordinated separates and a long coat. Then she opened her mouth. “Oh God, it’s just so cool,” she rhapsodized as she circled back, wide-eyed, to a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil. As a teenager she felt like she had to police her inner theater kid, now as a mother to a young son (she is married to the actor Alexander Dreymon), she feels more free to nerd out.
The post Allison Williams, of ‘Regretting You,’ Knows She’s Not the Underdog appeared first on New York Times.
