efore discussing her new movie, Michelle Williams, the twenty-one-year-old star of Dawson's Creek, gives an update on the WB show. Her character, Jen Lindley, the gradually reforming vixen, has recently deflowered the saintly Dawson Leery. “We got ‘consumed by our passion,’ sliding all around on these satin sheets,” she says, rolling her eyes and squirming. “It was really strange. For years, people have been talking about Dawson losing his virginity. I never thought it would be my job.”

Williams's apparent late-late-adolescent discomfort is surprising, given her self-possessed prime-time persona. Then again, the actress, who's poised for the American premiere of her delicately captivating turn as Holly, the brainy sidekick to flamboyant, manipulative Marina (played by Anna Friel) in British director Sandra Goldbacher’s bittersweet Me Without You, has a knack for confounding expectations. “As soon as I met Michelle, I realized she’s actually very unlike her [Dawson’s Creek] character,” Goldbacher says. “There’s a stillness, a subtleness, to her; the intensity is all there in her thoughts.

Williams, whose curvy, petite form has been reproduced not only on posters but wallpaper, could easily just make serial teenybopper blockbusters. The Montana-born actress moved to San Diego with her family at nine, began performing in local theater, and, self-directed from the start, became legally emancipated at sixteen in order to get acting work as a minor in L.A. (Williams says that at first her mom was “horrified and sad,” but since she’s had no shortage of roles and has repaired the family “rift,” she has no regrets.) After doing the scream-queen thing in Halloween H20, Williams made some atypical ingénue moves: playing a sexually abused (and frequently nude) teen in the 1999 Off-Broadway play Killer Joe and a flower child in love with Chloë Sevigny’s greaser chick in the HBO drama If These Walls Could Talk 2.

Looking back, Williams says, “There was this sexual theme. I was interested in sex in my own life—not questioning whether I wanted men or women, but exploring sex in the context of an adult life. I couldn’t really talk about it yet, but somebody I was playing could.” If her career has an ongoing M.O., she adds, it’s “to make choices reflecting things I’m interested in, so I have the most stuff to say.”

Williams saw an opportunity to plumb new territory in Me Without You, the story of two North London best friends who grow up next door to each other and come to blows as young adults. “Starting when I was little, I had these vicious, intense friendships,” she says. “I still have complex female friendships.” Williams’s grasp of the material is palpable. “She’s exactly right for the role,” Friel says. “Her sheer commitment to the character and the accent was massively impressive.” Holly gradually acquires enough spine to stand up to Marina in a maturation that feels utterly real—as if it’s pouring straight out of Williams’s heart.

In addition to appearing with Christina Ricci in Prozac Nation this spring, Williams will spend her hiatus from the Creek starring in a New York theater production of Mike Leigh’s Smelling a Rat as a “middle-class girl with a touch of Cockney who has proper ambitions.” Williams isn’t sure yet what personal connection has drawn her to this project, but, laughing, she says, “That’s what I’m going to find out.” And the fast money’s on her locating the soul of this character, too.—Louisa Kamps, Elle (June 2002)