Michelle Williams has a distinguishing beauty that makes her stand out. Her face, eyes and gestures are able to express so many different emotions without too much effort. The 30-year-old actress, born in Montana, is known for always sporting a natural, radiant, healthy look. Now, Michelle strikes a graceful, rather innocent pose for ‘Interview’ May 2020.
Inside the magazine, the actress opens up to Vendela Vida, talking about her Scandinavian descent and family. “I’m Norwegian”, she says, admitting she didn’t ever go back to Norway. “No, I’ve never been, and my mom didn’t speak it. We made a lot of lefsa, a Norwegian dessert, to compensate.”
The actress also talks about her obsession about making a home of her own, but also about preparing for the second half of ‘Blue Valentine’ and her latest movie ‘Meek’s Cutoff’. The film is about three couples in 1845 who, while traveling through the Oregon desert by covered wagon, begin to suspect that their guide has led them away from the right path.
Speaking about filming in Oregon and the weight of the dresses, Michelle says that, “I know! The dresses . . . I miss that. The only part of your body left exposed to the sun were your hands. My hands have aged at a rate disproportionate to the rest of my body because of being out there in the hot sun for two months. You couldn’t keep sunscreen on your hands; you were just sort of filthy all the time. But the dresses, they were ingenious for so many reasons.”
Still, what Michelle seems to miss the most are the bonnets. “Yeah, it’s like wearing blinders, really. But again, the lack of privacy on the trail almost created a sense of privacy when there is none. Zoe Kazan and I became close during the movie, and we missed our bonnets. I missed the whole thing,” she told the magazine.
In ‘Meek’s Cutoff’, Michelle is mostly shot at a distance, while in ‘Blue Valentine’ the camera was really close. “It was in the latter half of Blue Valentine that the camera started to encroach on us, which it seemed to me was part of Derek’s [Cianfrance, the director] intention for the look of the film and for the atmosphere he wanted his actors to live in. So the claustrophobia was something to absorb and work with,” the actress revealed.
As on how she and Ryan Gosling prepared for the second half of ‘Blue Valentine’, Michelle Williams says that, “We lived in this house, and what we really had to learn how to do, in the month or so that we had, was how to fight, because we had just come off the heels of making the first part of Blue Valentine, which was as fun and light and happy of an experience as I’ve ever had. I think Ryan felt similarly. So neither of us were quick to destroy that. We spent the first couple of weeks in the house just doing the dishes and making meals, taking out the trash and balancing out the budget and making home movies. But that wasn’t getting us to the place that we needed to go, so Derek had us step it up, and he would ask us to pick fights with each other.”
On what motivates her and makes her evolve, the actress admits that, “Stories. Keeping stories in my brain is important to me. I can get a story at the grocery store. If I’m paying attention, I can get it on the subway. I can get it in a book . . . Just catching a glimpse of how somebody is interacting with their child, or how they shape their nails or bop their head to the beat, and storing these little moments . . . Dreams . . . I’ll take it any way I can get it. But you also have to be paying attention and keep notes.”
Photos courtesy of Interview magazine
