The exact moment Michelle Williams realised she was “living a sinful artistic career”
Michelle Williams has been acclaimed for taking dangerous, experimental, and emotional roles that require her to show the type of bravery and sincerity that many of her peers wouldn’t have been capable of, which may have brought her accolades, but it’s also made it difficult when some of her loved ones don’t appreciate the choices she’s made.
Between her Emmy Award-winning role in Fosse/Verdon, four Academy Award nominations, and a recurring role within the Venom franchise, Williams has the range that frequently attracts praise from her peers, and even if some of her best work hasn’t received the attention that it deserves, she is one of the rare performers whose involvement in a project marks a sign of quality.
Williams’ career has spanned so long and taken so many interesting detours that it’s easy to forget that she got her start as a child actress, and she would even say to GQ that “there’s plenty of opportunities to tease someone who’s been in a Lassie movie”, referencing her first role ever in the 1994 family film.
However, the life of a child star often grows more difficult when they have to balance their professional opportunities with the realities of being a young person, especially if they grow up in a more conservative community.
The actor managed to begin getting homeschooled and taking correspondence courses by the time that Dawson’s Creek had blown up into one of the biggest shows for young adults, and although she was able to sidestep the critiques of her school principal, who would later criticise her work in Brokeback Mountain by saying that she “doesn’t represent the values of this institution”, it didn’t stop her from facing backlash from her own mother.
“It wasn’t any surprise to me,” Williams said, “I knew. I remember my mother saying to me at one point, ‘Just don’t make anything your grandmother couldn’t see’, and at that point, I knew I was living a sinful artistic career, because I had done, and I knew I would do.”
The role Williams knew would cross the line was her role in the New York play Killer Joe, a psychological thriller written by Tracy Letts, wherein having had also been offered the opportunity to appear in a more commercial feature during the same period of time, in the brief break between seasons of Dawson’s Creek, she still felt obliged to take on the more challenging material.
“That play, I see it as a direct link from there to where I am now,” Williams said.
Killer Joe is a pitch-black dark comedy about the relationships within a struggling Texas family who are forced to employ the services of a police detective who is also a hitman. The emotionally disturbing production required Williams to be nude onstage and appear within horrific moments of violence, which certainly wouldn’t have met with the approval of her instructors at Sante Fe Christian in New Mexico.
Nonetheless, Killer Joe became a bit of a cult sensation, in no small part due to the actor’s acclaimed role. Ironically, a cinematic adaptation of the play directed by William Friedkin debuted at festivals in 2011, the same year that Williams received an Academy Award nomination for her role in the controversial and tragic romantic drama Blue Valentine.
