Michelle Williams recalled how “horrible” it was to live with her “Blue Valentine” co-star, Ryan Gosling.
The actress, 44, opened up about how she and Gosling got on each other’s nerves while playing a married couple in the 2010 film during Monday’s episode of Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast.
“We shot the first part [of the movie] where they’re young and in love and everything is going really well,” Williams said. However, according to the movie’s script, their characters’ marriage would start to crumble over time.
She went on to explain that, as a form of method acting, they took a two-week break from filming and spent that time shacking up.
“Office hours, baby, like, 9-to-5. Professional situation,” Williams said. “So we did these improvisations during the day to, honestly, find out ways to annoy each other and to destroy this thing that we had made.”
To kick off their marital toxicity, they “burned” their characters’ wedding photo.
“We learned how to annoy each other. It was horrible,” she recalled.
The director, Derek Cianfrance, would even show up at their temporary shared home to give them a “scenario” that would cause them to drift apart.
“After you’ve had this frustrating day, now you’re going to go take your daughter to the amusement park and try and have a good time,” she recalled their director telling them, adding of the exercise, “It was fun.”
During the two weeks, Williams remembered thinking to herself that she didn’t want to give her co-star “reasons to hate [her.]”
“We were having such a good time. The party has to be over so soon?” she recalled thinking.
In the end, Williams was filled with contempt, not for Gosling, but for herself.
“You don’t have to hate me, because now I hate me,” she said. “I’m annoying. We [were] calling forth all our worst qualities!”
Williams divulged that the project initially wasn’t supposed to go on hiatus, but she and Gosling needed that time to learn how to get their characters to fall out of love.
“We were having such a hard time letting go of the thing we loved,” she said.
The “La La Land” actor, 44, previously opened up about living with Williams in order to learn how to make their characters’ downfall feel as “genuine and real and true” as possible.
“We also celebrated fake Christmas and put up Christmas trees and baked birthday cakes and bought birthday presents, and went to Sears,” Gosling told NPR in 2010.
“Whatever we could do to create real memories, so when it came time to shoot the [last] part of the film, we were drawing on real memories,” he explained.
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