Jessica Williams screwed a wooden hoop to a denim tote bag, then threaded a small needle with off-white thread.
“Oh, the thrill of it,” she said.
The actress and comedian currently stars in the Apple TV comedy “Shrinking.” Off-set, her hobbies are manifold — ceramics, cooking, music lessons on a heart-shaped guitar. Williams, 36, was soon to start a sewing class and she has upholstery ambitions. “I want to get a staple gun and just get in there,” she said. For her, hobbies are a pleasure, a way to calm a busy mind and a necessary distraction from a crazy-making industry.
“You have to find a life outside of acting, otherwise it’ll destroy you,” she said pleasantly.
On a chilly January morning a few weeks before the return of “Shrinking,” which begins its third season on Wednesday, Williams had come to a Midtown Manhattan office building for an introductory course in embroidery. Kristine Frailing, the founder of the New York Sewing Center, and Fabian Salazar, the school’s embroidery guru, met her in a private classroom with a stack of patterns and dozens of spools of colored thread.
Williams has earned Emmy nominations for each of the first two seasons of “Shrinking.” Described by the showrunner, Bill Lawrence, as “an odd comedic combination of self-confidence and simultaneous insecurity,” she lights up the screen as Gaby, an empathetic, effervescent psychologist. But she arrived at the sewing center visibly exhausted — a victim of jet lag, and a binge watch of “Members Only: Palm Beach,” a Netflix reality show, the night before.
But she brightened as she sat beneath a “Cut & Sew” neon sign. Wearing a knit beanie, soft pants and a faded T-shirt celebrating the mononymic wrestler Goldberg, she flipped among the patterns, selecting an outline of a martini glass. She planned to embroider the drink as she preferred it: “Super, super dirty. I want basically olives with a little bit of vodka.”
She began to sew the outline. She was, unsurprisingly, a natural. “I beasted these,” she said, gesturing to her stitches.
A born cutup, Williams began acting in school plays as a child in Torrance, Calif. Her parents were supportive, particularly her father, who had worked security for comedians. In high school she joined an improv team — “sports for dorks,” as she described it. She continued competitive improv in college, at Cal State Long Beach, where she began to audition for professional projects. At 22, she caught the eye of Allison Jones, a legendary casting director. Soon she was flown to New York to audition for Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”
Williams was a correspondent on the show for four years. (She also returned briefly in 2024.) John Oliver, another former correspondent, recalled that she arrived as a fully formed performer.
“She’s just innately funny, and her instincts are so sharp,” he wrote in an email. “And yet, despite being so naturally talented, she was also an incredibly hard worker.”
In 2016, as her “Daily Show” tenure was ending, she began recording the podcast “2 Dope Queens,” alongside the comedian Phoebe Robinson. What began as a frisky hangout morphed into a deft interview show that included two mini seasons on HBO. The final guest? Michelle Obama.
Williams might have stayed longer with the podcast or “The Daily Show,” but she feared being pigeonholed. She was being asked to host awards shows, to be a red carpet commentator.
“Which is great,” she said. “But for me, I knew I was always an actor.”
The transition to dramatic roles was not exactly seamless. She felt that she was rarely taken seriously in auditions.
“It’s hard when you’re a correspondent,” she said. “It’s hard when you’re a woman. It’s hard when you’re fully Black. You really have to repeatedly show people, time and time again, who you are before you start booking.”
Williams did win a small role in the “Fantastic Beasts” franchise and the title role in the 2017 Netflix movie “The Incredible Jessica James,” which was written for her. She was also cast as the romantic interest in the second season of the HBO Max series “Love Life,” opposite William Jackson Harper.
Harper recalls meeting her for a chemistry read. “It was just like, Oh damn,” he said. On set, he found her “crazy smart,” and simultaneously rigorous and relaxed. She had the gift, he said, of fusing herself with a character to the point that her performance appears entirely natural. “She makes things look a lot easier than they are,” he said.
On “Shrinking,” Williams also makes it look easy. Gaby is a skilled therapist given to vivid ensembles — another character describes her as “a gorgeous 6-foot-tall woman who dresses like human funfetti.” The writers hadn’t necessarily envisioned someone quite so tall or so maximalist, but this was part of the Williams package and a way to complicate a character who could have settled into stereotype.
Williams has been in therapy off and on since college. “I need it,” she said. “Acting’s hard, and being alive is suffering. It never hurts to talk to someone impartial.”
She welcomed the chance to play a compassionate clinician while ensuring that Gaby avoided becoming a Black lady therapist cliché — a helpmeet designed to empower white characters. “The way to escape tropes is with specificity,” she said. She participated in conversations about her character’s relationships, her vocabulary, her funfetti chic wardrobe. And she consulted on the casting of Damon Wayans Jr. as her love interest. Their relationship deepens in Season 3. (The show has already been renewed for a fourth season.)
Lawrence, who is also one of the show’s creators, had wanted her because of her gift for comedy. “She’s just flat-out funny,” he said. What surprised him was her ability to convey emotions both broad and fine. Gaby had been intended as the stable, cheerful clinician in an office shared with Jason Segel’s shambolic Jimmy and Harrison Ford’s gruff Paul. The writers soon varied that ebullience.
“We very immediately course corrected when we saw how good she was at being vulnerable,” Lawrence said.
That vulnerability surprised Segel, who is also a co-creator of the series. He knew Williams was a genius improvisor, but he hadn’t anticipated that her improvisations would sometimes move their scenes into something real and raw.
“That’s the most thrilling part of working with Jessica,” he said. “She can go toe to toe with the funniest person in the world, but she can also veer off into this little pocket of truth.”
She enjoys the acclaim from peers and the reputational boost of two supporting actress Emmy nominations. But has that recognition made landing subsequent jobs any easier?
“Not yet,” she said. “Again, I’m a Black actor.”
She wants to play all sorts of parts — in dramas, romantic comedies, horror movies, thrillers — and she knows that she can. “I know what I’m capable of,” she said. She is, she said, just waiting for the chance.
“People have to kind of go, Oh, wait, what about her?” she said. “What about the weird girl over there? The tall one? Let’s try it.”
In the meantime, she practices patience and pursues hobbies, embroidery being the latest. With Frailing’s help, she tied off the thread. “I’m kind of gagging,” she said happily. A few of the stitches were uneven, but she forgave the imperfections. She planned to complete the martini glass on the plane back home.
“If I were only doing acting, I would be so depressed,” she said. “So I try and just have a full life.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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