The one movie Michelle Williams will always regret not starring in: “You’re too old”
Despite not gaining the audience acclaim she deserves, Michelle Williams is, without a doubt, one of the most adept actors around, with a countenance that inspires you to unabashedly feel your deepest sentiments.
Her willingness to embody complex characters with layered backstories makes her an invaluable medium to translate deeply humane tales with nuance and a unique vulnerability that just the slightest move of her mouth can bring. Regardless of who she is playing, from a tortured starlette to a destitute with a dog as her only hold to the world around, she occupies them heart and soul, to the point where you feel like you are watching a real person live out their life onscreen.
These skills have brought her into the orbit of some of the greatest directors of all time. She famously starred in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, playing the onscreen wife of real-life partner Heath Ledger. When Steven Spielberg was making his semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans, Williams was cast as the character representing his mother. Kenneth Lonergan, Sam Raimi, Martin Scorsese, the list goes on, but perhaps her most important collaborator is indie film legend Kelly Reichardt.
Williams and Reichardt have worked together on four movies: the independent dog-centric drama Wendy and Lucy, the western, Meek’s Cutoff, Certain Women, a drama with an all-star cast including Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern, and Lily Gladstone, and Showing Up, a more comedic story that was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. However, having established such an affective bond, which is wont to happen when working on such arresting plotlines, when it came time for Reichardt to make her 2014 film Night Moves, Williams wasn’t cast, which brought out the worst in her.
“I am jealous of every other actor Kelly works with,” she told The Guardian. “Kelly said: ‘You’re too old’. I was, like… I had a really hard time on Meek’s Cutoff because there were lots of other actors, and I had been used to having Kelly to myself on Wendy and Lucy. I actually cried about it to her once. ‘I miss when it was just you, me and the dog’.” Apparently, Reichardt rolled her eyes at this comment before replying, “Michelle, I have to deal with other people now. And cattle. Grow up.”
Night Moves, the film Reichardt so cruelly pushed her friend aside while making (in Williams’ eyes, anyway), was released in 2014. It deals with themes of eco-terrorism and activism, as it follows the attempts of a group of environmentalists to destroy a controversial dam. The cast includes Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Alia Shawkat, who are all younger than Williams, but there is also a character played by Peter Sarsgaard, who is nine years older than her. The plot thickens…
While it’s true that Reichardt and Williams do arguably their best work when together, it’s important for actors and directors to step out of their comfort zones. Scorsese took a 24-year break from working with Robert De Niro, resulting in The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon, the latter of which produced the star’s best performance in years. There’s a danger with directors that they will rely on the same actors over and over again, resulting in stale, repetitive movies that become little more than online fodder.
Reichardt clearly feels comfortable working without Williams, as she isn’t in her upcoming heist movie, The Mastermind. Fingers crossed, Williams kept her jealousy under control this time; otherwise, Alana Haim might be getting a bag of flaming dog poop on her doorstep.
