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The Girls star talks to BuzzFeed about the Season 3 moment that made her cry, learning to love her haters, and searching for a career beyond Marnie.
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Allison Williams breezes into Café Grumpy on West 20th Street in New York, the Chelsea incarnation of the coffee shop where her character, Marnie Michaels, and creator Lena Dunham's Hannah occasionally work on Girls. It's a chilly March afternoon, just prior to the third season finale of Girls, and despite the fact that the place is full of twentysomethings that look like the neurotically flailing Marnie, no one seems to recognize the 25-year-old actress, who is currently clad in workout gear. Which is just fine, as fans of Dunham's critically acclaimed comedy tend to hate on Williams' character.
"I got Marnie on BuzzFeed's Which Girls Character Are You? quiz, and so did Lena [Dunham]," Williams says, almost conspiratorially, as she sips a cappuccino. "I love that Lena got it the most because I've always suspected she was more like Marnie than she wanted to admit, and this kind of sealed it."
Although, Williams implicitly understands why Dunham — or many of the show's fans — would pause at being compared to a character best described as an insecure passive-aggressive narcissist. "Marnie would drive me crazy if we were friends in real life," she says, matter-of-factly. "But I have to put that out of my head in order to play her. Like, sleeping with Elijah (Andrew Rannells) is crazy, sleeping with Ray (Alex Karpovsky) is crazy, furiously hitting on Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) when he mentions his girlfriend in their first conversation is crazy; but I have to be on the couch with her and Elijah hoping they fuck, I have to be in that apartment with Ray kinda wanting it to happen, and I have to support her quest for Desi."
But there has been one choice Marnie's made over the course of Girls' three turbulent seasons that Williams truly struggled to understand. And that was sleeping with conceptual artist Booth Jonathan (Jorma Taccone) in Season 2. "I was fighting that the whole time as Allison," she says, with a sigh. "I did not want her to go down that road. I thought Marnie was better than that, but she wasn't, so I had to be OK with it too. I had to believe Booth was a genius when I walked out of that TV tower, whereas I, as Allison, couldn't stop thinking, It puts the lotion on its skin."
Pop culture references (like that Silence of the Lambs quote) are par for the course with Williams, a self-professed entertainment nerd, who — over the course of a 90-minute long interview — vows to audition for the role of Anna if Disney's Frozen truly does make it to Broadway, dissects her obsession with audiobooks (she's currently listening to Middlesex), and gushes over a dozen shows (Scandal, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, True Detective, House of Cards, Nashville, The Following, The Mindy Project, Downton Abbey, Mad Men) in a matter of minutes. "I think I watch so much TV now because I wasn't allowed to watch any as a child," she says of her Connecticut upbringing.
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Born in 1988 to Bloomberg Radio producer/host Jane Gillian Stoddard and NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, public television was the only kind young Williams was allowed to consume. And that was a blessing in disguise as she recalled a childhood spent communing with the environment instead of being glued to the television, watching Captain Planet. Williams was a self-described "weird nature kid," whose weekends were spent "picking up poop and trying to figure out what animal it came from based on what was in it."
And while she happily adhered to her parents' rules, like any child, Williams eventually found admittedly small ways to rebel as her 13th birthday approached. "One time, my babysitter was watching the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue special and I saw the whole thing from in between the hinges of a door," Williams recollects, half-whispering as if her parents could retroactively admonish her. "I remember seeing women in bikinis and thinking, basically, This is porn."
Williams readily acknowledges the irony: One decade after mistaking that swimsuit special for porn, the girl who wasn't allowed to watch TV is starring in one of the most frank series about female sexuality to ever exist. But unlike critics who've attacked Girls' nudity quotient, Williams steadfastly believes every inch of flesh is earned in the pursuit of portraying the Girls characters' truths.
And she is flummoxed that she and the rest of the cast and crew are still, in Season 3, fielding questions about their bare bodies. At The Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour in January 2014, Girls executive producer Judd Apatow and reporter Tim Molloy shared a very public war of words after he directed the following question at Dunham:
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