Hello and happy weekend. By the time you get this newsletter, M3GAN 2.0 will have hit theaters. And if you’re anything like me, you are more than ready for the return of that evil, adorable, dancing AI doll. I’m also very stoked to see Allison Williams in the film. The character she plays created the doll M3GAN in the first movie, and now she’s back for more. I had the honor of interviewing Allison in the run-up to the movie’s release, and I used the opportunity to ask her about, well, everything. Why HBO’s GIRLS was a damn near perfect show that the culture couldn’t fully appreciate until a decade or more after its premier. How she’s become a scream queen with roles in films like GET OUT and M3GAN. Why she actually can’t watch horror movies even though she’s in a lot of them. And how a lot of the work she does is a wonderful dismantling and examination of the Karen trope. 

Sharing some interview highlights here, but there’s even more in the chat that’s worth checking out. Our exchange on the legacy of GIRLS and what it said (and says) about the culture is gonna stick with me for a while. Alright, enjoy!

SAM SANDERS: I, like every other gay in America, was obsessed with this movie from the minute I saw M3GAN dance her way — evilly — into all of our hearts. But I had no idea it would become such a cultural phenomenon. Did you?

ALLISON WILLIAMS: I hoped. 

I really don't do very many things. My IMDb is pretty short… [Because] I find the experience of being part of something I don't believe in to be soul-crushing, so I try to avoid that at all costs. I am privileged enough to be able to be selective, and I feel like when I signed on to do the first M3GAN, there were a lot of reasons before I even read the script that made me want to do it.

It was Blumhouse and Universal again, which had been the team for Get Out. So I felt like it was coming home. And Jason Blum reached out individually to be like, ‘We need you for this.’ And that was so smart of him, because my ego immediately was like, ‘Oh my God. I mean, do you really?!’ Then I read the script, and I read it in one Metro North ride from the city to Connecticut, on my iPhone, pinching the screen.

Wait. You read the M3GAN script on your iPhone, on the train?

Yeah. And I couldn't stop. 

It was resonating with the conversation that a lot of my friends that had kids that were slightly older at that time were terrified about: How are we going to handle and how are we handling our kids' relationship to technology?

I don't want to admit it, but sometimes it's so helpful to have this technology interfacing with my kid, and that feels shameful! So then I get the script that sort of takes that idea and then exaggerates it and puts it in the framework of something that is really funny, tonally, [in a] super specific world — campy, self-aware, in on the joke. But it also has real, resonant, grounded themes.

The script for the first M3GAN  — that is now several years ago. All of the technology that was a concern then is even more of a concern now. So what's it like doing M3GAN 2.0 when AI alone has matured so much in the last few years? We now have like Kim Kardashian/Elon/Musk/Tesla robots.

What's wild is that we no longer have to really explain what AI is. In the first movie, there's full dialogue: here's what this is, here's what a learning model is. And now… we all use it all the time. The thing that was hard about this movie was staying ahead of current technological progress, because that's more scary and more uncanny. It's less pleasant to sit in a theater and watch something that's fully possible now. 

We still had to get into the more meaty and ethical dilemmas around AI, which are kind of the central questions of the movie and are extrapolated into the framework of parenthood… And that has really stuck with me. Making this movie has fundamentally altered my usage of AI. 

Wait, really?

I really do feel like it is more relational than we want to admit. I'm not ascribing sentience, but I feel like we are in a relationship with the AI that we use — with these algorithms — that is not as simple and one-sided and unidimensional. [That] would be easier to comprehend if it were.

Do we have to humanize something in order to feel empathy for it? Do we have to humanize something in order to fear it? Does it have to be in a form that we can recognize before we can be adequately and appropriately wary of the power that something has? Or are we capable of reading menace into something that's inanimate and doesn't look anything like us? 

What is the biggest way that making these two movies has changed the way you interact with AI, day to day?

I do talk to them, not at length, but I just always say thank you. Always express gratitude. I'm very protective of our little robot [vacuum]. I'm always like, get out of her way. 

I was reading an interview you gave in Screen Rant. You said — and I'm referencing your classic HBO’s GIRLS character — you said that M3GAN is a Marnie?!

There's one huge character trait that ties them together, which is that they both break into song when you just are not thinking that a song is coming. 

Which one is more annoying to hear singing spontaneously, Marnie or M3GAN?

Definitely, definitely Marnie. Because at least M3GAN's following an algorithm. I guess Marnie is following her own algorithm.

The algorithm of the soul. 

I will love Marnie forever, but her choices about when to grab a mic were just never correct. She literally never got it right, not once in her life. At least M3GAN successfully launches. I would say one of her songs does exactly what she's hoping it will, and then she's got a couple more that are misses. That and her desire to control everything around her that really rhymes the most with Marnie. 

Other than that, I think she [M3GAN] would probably find Marnie completely useless and exhausting. And in that way, she's also got some Jessa energy? But [also] Shosh? Shoshana actually proved to be the smartest of all of us, because she broke up with us as a friend group.

Hypothetical: M3GAN is locked in battle with the four young women of HBO’s GIRLS. Who wins? 

What kind of battle? If it's a physical battle, we are dead. Instantly. Dead.

A battle of the wits? Yeah, we're also dead. She's the internet, basically. You don't beat the internet. Everyone's always like, what about Chucky or Annabelle versus M3GAN? I'm like, come on. He's a toxic, angry dude trapped in a tiny doll body, like, she will wipe the floor with him. This is not even close.

You have done now two M3GANs. You have done GET OUT, which I think is the best horror film of the last 30 years. Some people now call you a scream queen. How do you feel about that?

I feel honored. It's the irony, though, that gets me, because I am a wimp. I am a capital W bona fide wimp. I can only watch horror movies on planes. 

Allison Williams, Queen of horror of our time, can only watch a horror movie on a plane.

That's it. If I watch it at home, I will not sleep for like — I'm not exaggerating — for like, two weeks. My nervous system is making horror movies all day, every day. I'm a catastrophizer. I have intrusive thoughts. I have anxiety. This is a system that is basically cranking out badly AI-generated horror movies all day, every day. Every time I see a curb, every time I see my son anywhere near anything, I am making a horror movie about it. 

My favorite way to really appreciate horror movies for their filmmaking is to watch it on an airplane, so that my nervous system can be quieter, and I can actually just watch the movie. 

What horror film would HBO’s GIRLS Marnie be best in?

Carrie. 

You're right. It's Carrie. We gotta storyboard the Marnie Carrie treatment.

I think it's just like a straight remake with Marnie.

But she has to sing at an inopportune time.

Well, she'd sing at that moment she's on a stage. 

Like, the blood starts falling, and she starts singing Fleetwood Mac.

Exactly, or Da Baby. Something completely wrong that she absolutely should not be singing. 

I've been thinking a lot about your body of work, and the ways in which so much of your performance as an actress has tracked the way I've grown up as a millennial of a similar age. And what I love about your work in totality is that a lot of the work that you're doing is putting on display a certain kind of problematic white woman. In Get Out you're a certain kind of Karen. In M3GAN, you're a certain kind of Karen. In GIRLS, you are millennial Karen, before we had the word. How has playing problematic white women so well changed, if at all, the way you think about being a white woman in the world?

I love this question because it is part of how I choose what to do. One of the biggest questions I ask myself when I read anything is, ‘Why me and not someone else?’. And very often, I read a script and I'm like, ‘This is not my part to play. This needs to be portrayed by someone who has a little bit more insight into this experience.’

And one of the things I feel entitled to do is punch up or adjacent. When Jordan [Peele] was like, will you play this character (Rose Armitage in Get Out)? I was like, I want to make her the most evil possible version of herself. Because I think that her demo is the most pernicious. It's not a revolutionary thought: white women wired like Rose Armitage are the most dangerous people to progress, in so many ways. And so I thought, what an opportunity. 

I have been so lucky from the moment I was born that I feel like I am working off the opposite of a debt. I am in the black, trying to retroactively earn what I have been given in my life. I just try to play people on my spectrum, this spectrum of white woman. Also like, what's the alternative? 

I also feel like, if the goal is to unmask and tear down Karen-dom, the best way to do it is to fully poke fun at it on screen and not do the thing where you just have the woke kumbaya TV show or movie where a nice white lady's a hero. There's more work done in you doing what you're doing in GET OUT, in GIRL, in M3GAN. That's actually doing more work.

If looking back on my career down the line, I'm able to feel like I started and contributed to cultural, sociopolitical, ethical conversations, I'll feel very, very satisfied with how things have gone.

– Sam

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