“It was so awful”: the one movie Michelle Williams wants to delete from history
Michelle Williams might not love the peripheral work of being an actor, the press junkets and the photoshoots and all the other public-facing commitments, but she does happen to be one of the greatest actors of her generation.
Unlike some stars who build their careers off-screen even more zealously than on, Williams lets her performances do the talking and seems shy to the point of physical discomfort in some interviews.
On screen, however, she is a ferocious presence, venturing to emotional depths and heights that few of her peers dare to approach. Blue Valentine, Derek Cianfrance’s tortured drama about a deeply dysfunctional romance between Williams’ and Ryan Gosling’s characters, is perhaps the most obvious example, but she brought similar levels of emotional rawness to everything from Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy to Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island.
At this stage, anything she is in is guaranteed to knock your socks off through the sheer power of her performance, even if the film itself is hard to watch, but early in her career, though, she made a movie that was hard to watch for other reasons. Timemaster was a 1995 science fiction romp (though that word is far too generous) about a kid who travels through time trying to rescue the planet from malevolent aliens.
Williams was still a teenager at the time and played the love interest of the adolescent boy; she does her best with a terrible script and a co-star whose greatest achievement appears to be line memorisation, but to put it mildly, the film does not work. To her credit, she doesn’t disown the film entirely, which she explained in a 2002 interview with Combustible Celluloid, saying, “I’ve been doing this for 11 years, and for it to be interesting, it should be varied”.
A mere decade into her career, one terrible sci-fi flick did count as a variation, but three decades in, Timemaster is barely a footnote thanks to the calibre and adventurousness of her more recent efforts.
Perhaps Williams has felt the same, as when discussing the film on another occasion, the Oscar winner said, “It was so awful. We turned the ‘M’ upside down and called it ‘Timewaster’”. For the record, that joke is significantly funnier than anything in the film.
Williams is far from the first acting legend to get their start in a terrible science fiction film as a teen, with Ethan Hawke facing the same experience with Explorers, though its box office failure drove him to premature retirement at the tender age of 14. In contrast, Williams was undeterred by the dismal experience of working on Timemaster, and in fact, she was so serious about acting that, a year later, she filed for emancipation from her parents so that she could pursue her career without the pesky constraints of child labour laws.
Shortly thereafter, she appeared in a Halloween sequel and landed a lead role in the beloved teen drama Dawson’s Creek, putting Time[w]aster behind her as soon as production wrapped and has never looked back since, except to appreciate how far she’s come.
