Here's the first part of the interview with Michelle Williams that's featured in the April edition of
Elle magazine. I read the full article while killing time in a waiting room today, and, I have to tell you, it is a good read.
BTW, the interview took place three weeks after Christmas, 2007. Michelle told the interviewer that she and Heath had been broken up for six months.
http://www.elle.com/featurefullstory/13724/michelle-williams-elle-april-2008.htmlThe Unbearable Lightness of BeingMichelle Williams was born with a gift for acting, a love of books, and an acute sense of self. While filming in Sweden in the weeks before Heath Ledger’s death, the Oscar-nominated actress and young mother opened up about life and love, with amazing grace. By Holly Millea
She stole the keys. She stole the car. She stole into the night that is already morning on the dashboard clock: 3:26 a.m., 01.09.08. It is too late and too early and too soon to tell if Michelle Williams has pushed her luck. “I’ll take my chances,” the actress says, turning the engine over, breathing warmth into her cupped hands. The snow is falling, the digital seconds flashing, the wipers swiping as a man on the radio sings a twangy country tune, “Goodbye ole paint, I’m a leavin’ Cheyenne…,” cutting the cold, sleeping silence of this Swedish industrial town. In the windows of the dark houses, electric candelabra glow, still burning from Christmas nearly three weeks past.
The black iced road glistens, curving this way and that way, down, down, down the mountain, away from the old Albert Hotel, which has opened especially for her. A mansion dating from 1857, it perches on a cliff above Trollhättan, home to a Saab factory, wondrous waterfalls, and the Gõta Ãlv River, where, local legend has it, large trolls live. Literally translated, Trollhättan is Trolls’ Hood, and the residents are not to be taken lightly. In the midst of their watery stomping ground is Mímir’s Well, owned and operated by Mímir, a Norse deity renowned for his wisdom (and a striking resemblance to Kris Kristofferson). It is said that anyone who drinks from his well has the power to see the future. Odin gave an eye for the privilege, and in peering through Time’s keyhole, he never smiled again.
"I’m obsessed with water,” Williams says. “The scene in
Brokeback Mountain when I open the door and see Heath and Jake kiss? Everyone was outside and I was in this hallway by myself, and I just kept thinking, I want to be like water. I want to slip through fingers, but hold up a ship.”
An open bag of Veggie Booty sits between the seats. This would belong to Matilda Rose Ledger, age two. She is named after the Roald Dahl children’s classic
Matilda—a girl born of beastly parents but blessed with magical powers that make her feel as if she’s “flying past the stars on silver wings.”
STOP THE CAR. STOP THE CLOCK, the song, the snow. Let's go back to the hotel and look through the keyhole from the other side and see things as they were, see them as they were, before what we now know happened.
There in the Albert's cozy, candlelit front room, Matilda, a dark-eyed, blond, bobbed imp, is working her magic, coaxing a serious, bespectacled waiter named Peter into a smile with her impressive vocabulary, impeccable manners, and a few yoga tricks, ending on her back in straddle splits, with her feet pulled up to her ears. It doesn't take a swig from the well to foretell that Matilda is going to be an actress. Or a
Cirque du Soleil star. In the wake of applause, she stands, smooths her beige dress over pale pink tights, and asks, “Mommy, will you chase me now?”
“It's not chasing time, Matilda, it's simmer-down time,” Williams says, scooping her up, kissing her forehead. “Come on, you can watch Wonder Pets in bed before you go to sleep.”
Mother, daughter, and nanny have settled into a suite above the sitting and dining rooms in the hotel. The rest of the cast and crew of
Mammoth, the movie she is here shooting, are lodged in an adjacent building. Williams has braved Sweden in the dead of winter to film the relationship drama—as dark and disquieting as the mythical environs—opposite Gael García Bernal. “I'm here for three weeks,” she says, adding with a smile, “any longer than that and I'd have to be medicated.” From the top of the stairs, Matilda calls down, “Peter! Peter! Goodnight Peter!”
With Matilda safe and sound asleep, Williams sits in the dining room, where candles burn on every table and every table is empty. Dressed in black jeans, a button-down shirt, and an argyle sweater, she is boyishly slight. Her features—lips, cheeks, liquid brown eyes—are full. She has only one dimple, there on her right cheek, but what the other cheek lacks, this dimple makes up in depth. Her blond hair is short, in what she considers an awkward growing-out stage, and full of bobby pins. “Bobby pins are my favorite jewelry,” Williams says. “There's nothing sexier than bobby pins.” She gasps suddenly. “That moment in
Lolita, when Humbert Humbert is driving into the cow pasture and fingering the bobby pin? Goose bumps!” Even now. Smiling, she pulls up a sleeve revealing her goose-bumped arm.
Her smiles come easily but are complicated, never carefree. “I'm always aware of the whole,” Williams says. “I have that feeling inside, like when something really tickles or delights me—it's not singular. I recognize all the awful things in the world, and in spite of them, I can still laugh.” This hyperawareness has come at a price. “For so long, I felt like a walking open wound everywhere I went,” she says. “There's this Joan Didion quote about being afflicted from an early age with a presentiment of loss. Did I come into the world like that? Or was I kind of gifted that?”
Like extrasensory perception, you either have it or you don't. It's a poignant, painful, and appealing quality that cannot be acted. “Your heart just races to her,” says the director Ang Lee, who cast Williams in her Oscar-nominated role in
Brokeback Mountain. “I needed that for the part of the dejected wife—the least interesting, dullest part you can imagine. But Michelle in this role—you want to know what happened in her life, clearly a tragic one. You're never told, but you want to find out.”
It was on Lee's set that Williams and her costar Heath Ledger famously fell in love. “They were so sweet together,” Lee tells me in a January 19 interview, three days before Ledger's death. “I ran into Heath at the Venice Film Festival, and he told me about the split. I just felt so sad. I didn't know what to say to him. They made a great effort.”
“It was so heartbreaking to watch that not work out,” says the director Todd Haynes, calling later the same day. The couple took roles in
I'm Not There, Haynes' experimental Bob Dylan biopic, with Ledger as one of six Dylan incarnates and Williams as the Edie Sedgwicky socialite Coco Rivington. “You can't fault either of them. Really, two of the most extraordinary people,” Haynes continues. “True artists, naked and stripped-down as they approach their craft. Different people with different temperatures and rhythms, exploring themselves.”
CHECK OUT THE APRIL ISSUE OF ELLE, ON NEWSSTANDS NOW, FOR THE FULL STORY ON MICHELLE WILLIAMS.