Michelle Williams has come a long way from ‘Dawson’s Creek.’ A poignant role in ‘Brokeback Mountain’ has brought her Oscar buzz, and the baby in her arms has given her new confidence.
ON A SUNDAY EVENING IN BROOKLYN, Michelle Williams and Heath Ledger tuck into an early dinner of steak and red wine at their bustling neighborhood bistro. Williams holds their 8-week-old baby, Matilda, in her arms, as Bob Marley sings in the background. After the meal, Ledger puts on a knit cap, swaddles his peanut-suze daughter to his chest, and leaves Williams to her interviewer. “Take care of my girl,” he instructs genially before retreating from the golden-lit restaurant to their nearby brownstone. ● Williams, who at 25 is both a new mother and new to the type of critical acclaim she’s earned for her performance as Ledger’s beleaguered wife in Brokeback Mountain, looks for a minute like she might cry. “I’m sorry,” she says, “everything’s a little bit of a mess right now. I had to breast-feed in the restaurant, and that’s the first time I’ve done that. I couldn’t get my shirt down,” she says, pulling on the neck of her black sweater before taking a deep breath to settle herself. “The first times are confusing and overwhelming, and I’m trying to learn how to deal with so many first times and not get harried and frustrated.” ● The couple couldn’t stomach the paparazzi-and-premiere rigors of Hollywood, and they chose to live in Brooklyn over Manhattan because, Williams says, when you get off the subway, you can “see the sky.” After she and Ledger, 26, brought Matilda home from the hospital, they didn’t have any help or family staying with them for the first month. “We’re young parents, and too easily I could have become dependent,” she explains. “I learned that there’s nothing that I can’t do for her. Is she fed, is she wet, is she bored, is she tired?”
Harder, of course, is adjusting to her own shifting desires and needs. After more than a decade in the business, and six long years on the teen soap Dawson’s Creek, Williams is suddenly being spoken about in the same breath as fellow Golden Globe nominees Shirley MacLaine and Frances McDormand. “I can’t figure out if it’s the best time for this to be happening, because my life is already so full with a new baby, and I can’t get too caught up,” she says, “or is it a bummer that I can’t capitalize now on years of hard work?”
WHEN BROKEBACK DIRECTOR ANG LEE WAS READY TO audition actresses for the role of Alma, a young Wyoming woman married to a taciturn gay ranch hand, his casting director, Avy Kaufman, suggested Williams, who was raised in rural Montana before moving to California when she was 8. Kaufman told him the actress wasn’t an obvious choice, but he should take a look at her understated work in The Station Agent to get a sense of her appeal. “Something about her,” says Lee, “you look at her and you wish her happiness. She’s quite close to how Alma was written, this small beautiful woman with all that quality of vulnerability.”
Williams says her favorite scenes in the movie are the ones without words, like when a windblown Alma hangs laundry on a clothesline or when she opens the screen door, sees her husband kissing another man, and retreats silently back into their apartment. “She reminds me of a child actor,” says Lee, “in the best sense. You give her a set of directions, and she listens and looks straight in your eyes like a child. Sometimes you have to beat up actors so badly to get them to believe what they’re doing. Like a child, she believes.”
Off screen, she and Ledger quickly fell for each other. “I think their love affair was especially helpful for Heath,” says Lee. “He was playing a complex, really clenched-up role full of self-loathing. The relationship nourished him and kept him grounded and helped him leave the set peacefully.” The couple watched the finished movie for the first time alone in a screening room, squeezing each other’s hands throughout the sad story. “It’s unnatural to watch yourself on screen,” says Williams. “It’s awkward-making and induces a wild state of self-consciousness and self-hatred. I walked out and couldn’t remember anything about the movie.” She saw the film once more in their Brooklyn living room, Ledger popping in and out to sit with her. “I just cried and cried and cried,” she says. “I wasn’t able to appreciate anything that I did, but I was able to appreciate other people’s work. I feel proud of Heath. I feel awed by him, by how much he tricked me on screen. And he says he’s proud of me.”
Even if she’s hard on herself, Williams is able to appreciate her career progression. She cut her teeth on Dawson’s Creek, playing bad girl Jen Lindley, before moving on to indie films like The United States of Leland and Wim Wenders’ Land of Plenty. She’s only recently come to terms with her TV résumé. (Creek costar Busy Philipps is Matilda’s godmother.) “It doesn’t plague me like it used to,” says Williams. “Just the teenageriness of it, how immature it was, that people would think that I was this character. In the beginning, it was a hard load to bear being slutty and tawdry and sexy. That was really confusing for my self-image at that age.” When Williams was 17, she made the skimpy rounds of lad-magazine covers until she realized she had a say in the direction of her career. “I didn’t have a clue that you didn’t have to do what people told you,” she says. “I just thought, Well, this is how people act. They get in bikinis. It wasn’t presented as ‘Do you wanna do this classy profile or do you want to get into a bikini on the cover of Maxim?’
“When I was younger,” she continues, “I felt the weight of everything on my shoulders without the promise of anything. I was messier. A lot of that came out of embarrassment, just [a general state of] mortification. And after the things my body has just accomplished, I just don’t feel as guilty or apologetic. It was all because of the pregnancy,” she says, breaking into a loud, easy laugh for the first time. “Well, more so the delivery. Sorry I’m naked! Sorry I’m bleeding! Sorry I’m pooping! None of that! I’m not sorry!”
Since Matilda was born, Williams has signed on to a supporting part in Ethan Hawke’s Hottest State, but insists she won’t be devoting herself to a large role anytime soon. “I really feel sated by some of the work that I’ve done,” she says firmly. “To come from Dawson’s Creek and to wind up working with Ang, I feel done. For now.”
LEE MET MATILDA WHEN SHE WAS ONLY 4 WEEKS OLD, AND he says the infant “just stared at me like she knew me.” The director laughed and told her parents that “Baby hasn’t forgotten matchmaker!”
“I’m curious what it will be like for Matilda when she’s older,” says Williams. “To see how her parents met on that movie. They have such an unhappy outcome, yelling and fighting and divorcing. It will hopefully be unlike any way she’s ever seen her mother and father.”
After two hours of conversation, Williams bundles up in her gold-buttoned peacoat, preparing for the cold walk home. She doesn’t want to miss her daughter’ calming nightly routine of bath, book (“Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?” Williams happily recites), and bed. “Matilda demonstrates the beauty of first times best—when she rolls over for the first time, when she tries to hang on to something for the first time,” she says. “Life is full of first times right now and you just have to be aware of that to catch them and appreciate them.” ◼