“Have you seen the fucking pictures I’ve done? They’re all about my breasts. That’s just not who I am, and it makes me feel kind of…dirty.”

MICHELLE WILLIAMS
By Eric Gladstone

Michelle Williams does not want to talk about sex. Despite the fact that she is most identified for playing the highly sexualized Jen Lindley on “Dawson’s Creek,” that she disrobed night after night on a New York stage last year, and that she features in a steamy love scene in HBO’s lesbian-themed “If These Walls Could Talk 2,” the teen actress thinks being a sex symbol is not much of an aspiration. “Sex symbol, sex pot,” she spits out. “That’s worthless to me, that’s gutter filth.”

Instead, like another misunderstood blonde before her—Marilyn Monroe—Michelle is more interested in books. Browsing the hushed hallways of Los Angeles’ Heritage Bookshop, a dealer of rare volumes she visits frequently, Williams takes stock of some of her favorite authors. She looks at a Thomas Pynchon, considers Phillip Roth, Upton Sinclair and J.D. Salinger, and asks about Dostoyevsky. And, as if to prove she isn’t just a literary tourist, notes in passing that she “can’t get through Faulkner” and doesn’t like Hemingway. You wouldn’t have an easy time finding a 19 year old so well read, especially one who’s had practically no formal schooling since the ninth grade. Finally, she settles on a first edition Tennessee Williams collection (containing a favorite play, “This Property Is Condemned”). It sets her back nearly $300.

Michelle has been collecting such editions since she “all of a sudden had the money,” thanks to the success of “Dawson’s Creek” three years ago. Her prized possessions are a rare copy of Ibsen’s “The Doll’s House” and an antique set of Shakespeare in its raw state. “Some are so old, like the Shakespeare, that you can’t really read them,” she explains dreamily. “But I touch them. And I smell them. And I run my hands over them. And I have an affair with them,” she chuckles. “It’s about as interesting as my sex life gets.”

That seems hard to believe, not so much because of her steady relationship with indie director Morgan J. Freeman (Hurricane Streets, Desert Blue), but for the free-spirited sensuality the actress exudes as “Linda” in the “1972” segment of “If These Walls Could Talk 2.” In the most erotically-charged of the three lesbian-themed tales, Michelle’s feminist bra-burning character falls for a politically incorrect butch dyke played by Chloe Sevigny, who seduces her in a revealing nude scene.

“It’s a really vulnerable place to be” Michelle says, of shooting the explicit scene. “But I’m also really glad that my first love scene was with a woman. It was a really natural process.”

How natural was it? Well, ask the actress what kissing Sevigny felt like and she exclaims, “Have you seen her? She’s fucking hot!” But Michelle backtracks when asked if that lifestyle interests her.

“I think that everybody is probably curious by nature,” she responds coyly, realizing that we are, yes, talking about sex–something she doesn’t want to do, “without a cigarette,” at least.

Later, lighting an American Spirit outside a nearby hotel, she continues: “It just seems completely irrelevant to me, because it doesn’t make me any more or less qualified to play a lesbian.” And, she emphasizes, the tele-film “isn’t about a love scene, it’s about love.”

“It was a brave scene for them,” says Martha Coolidge, director of the segment. “[Michelle had] a tremendous commitment to what the movie was about. She really believed in the sort of humanist anti-discrimination idea behind the whole project.”

Continued at Pt. 2

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Copyright 2000, 2009 ECG

MICHELLE WILLIAMS
By Eric Gladstone

Still, Williams admits that she probably didn’t weigh the scene as heavily as she should have. “Having just done nudity on stage [in the off-Broadway play “Killer Joe”], I was sort of fearless about it and felt brazen and you know, liberated. Which may have been a dangerous way to feel, because the beauty of theatre is that you create and recreate each night. There’s no rewind button.”

Michelle is a bit fed up with the contradictions in how the media portray teen sexuality. On the one hand, she figures “kids are always going to have sex, and that’s not a bad thing. I wish that there wasn’t such a stigma attached that made girls feel like sluts and whores, because it’s [part of] growing up.”

On the other hand, she has misgivings about many of the revealing photo shoots she’s participated in. “Have you seen the fucking pictures I’ve done?” she rants. “They’re all about my breasts. That’s just not who I am, and it makes me feel kind of…dirty.” It also made her feel like giving her then-publicist the boot. “I didn’t want teen girls or my little sister thinking that that’s a woman’s power, that’s how girls should look.

Williams is confident that her little sister Page, 16, will support her latest performance, as will her mom. Boyfriend Freeman, 30, approves, but Michelle confides, “the thought of somebody else touching your lover’s body or knowing things only you should know, is a really tricky thing.” And Dad?
“I’m not sure what my dad’s going to think.”

By her own account, Michelle’s relationship with both parents has been tumultuous. Larry and Carla Williams raised Michelle and Page (she also has a half-brother and two half-sisters, all older, from Larry’s previous marriage) in tiny Kalispell, Montana. Michelle describes it as “a really small, beautiful, but at the same time industrial dirty town.” As a kid, she was an outdoorsy tomboy, skiing with her uncle at the age of six, riding jet skis on a nearby lake with neighbors, and bonding with Dad over boxing matches on TV.

“He was pretty much my best friend growing up,” says Michelle of Larry, a commodities trader and ‘round-the-world “treasure hunter” who also ran two unsuccessful campaigns for the US Senate as a Republican. “He taught me to read and love books and to love travel, and be independent.” Michelle’s relationship with Carla was not so great, especially after the family relocated to San Diego when she was nine. “I was rebellious and rude, and disrespectful of her.” Perhaps ironically, Michelle says her relationship with mom has improved greatly over the past year, while she glosses over her current status with dad; Mr. and Mrs. Williams are currently going through a divorce.

“I can’t really remember not wanting to act,” she recalls. “The opportunity to do plays was given to me at a really early age, and I never really wanted to be without it.” Thus, after her freshman year of high school, Michelle opted to finish via correspondence classes, completing three years’ requirements in the space of one. And at 15, against objections, she moved to L.A. with an eye on the silver screen. Soon after, she also legally emancipated from her parents because it made getting roles easier, “and because I was rebellious.”

Continued at Pt.3

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Copyright 2000, 2009 ECG

MICHELLE WILLIAMS
By Eric Gladstone

“Moving to L.A., I don’t know if I would’ve had the guts to do it now as opposed to when I was 15, and was fearless. In a lot of senses I wasn’t [ready for it].” Nor, even after spots on “Baywatch” and “Home Improvement,” and film roles in Timemaster, Species, and a remake of Lassie (all of which she is neither ashamed, nor particularly proud), was she ready for the instant notoriety that came with hit TV show, “Dawson’s Creek.”

“It was just really overwhelming,” says Michelle of the first flush of success. “There were so many things I didn’t expect or understand.”

She visibly brightens at the thought of describing her short life in literary examples. But her answers are also telling: after “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe,’ for her childhood and Judy Blume books for her pre-teen years, she chooses Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground” Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” and Herman Hesse for the last several years—not exactly light reading. For recent months, she picks the poetic erotica of Anais Nin.

Right now, though, sitting in a booth at the historic and newly-hip Hollywood haunt Musso and Frank’s Grill, Michelle seems like she jumped right out of the pages of Salinger. Far away from both her teen fans and detractors (like the creators of the “I Hate Jen” website), she tucks her knees up against her in the leatherette and wood booth, taking nibbles of a grilled cheese sandwich and sips of tomato soup between thoughts. She laughs at the thought of any special diet or work out regime (“I smoke a lot and I hear that keeps the weight down,” she cracks), but also admits sullenly that she isn’t a bit comfortable with her body. “Not at all,” she whispers

“I keep having dreams about having a disability. I had a dream the other night that my arm was just a stump from here, and my leg ended just below my knee. I keep having dreams about it, that I’m missing something.”

Williams is loathe to criticize “Dawson’s,” now in its third season, but admits her steady job is “like punching in a time card.” She is also feeling the constraints of being under a six-year contract. “I can’t really imagine doing another TV show after this.

“What if I decide that I want to be a school teacher [one of her half-sisters’ profession] what if I said I wanted to move to Paris and study art, or if I’d want to become a truck driver? Maybe I will want to go to college.”

Still she paints an enviable picture of her home life in the tiny island village of Wrightsville, ten minutes from Wilmington, North Carolina where “Dawson’s” shoots.

“I went to a psychic yesterday, somebody who came highly, highly recommended. And she said, ‘you live in a warm place, it’s so full of light.’” While Michelle doesn’t know how many of the psychic’s predictions to take seriously (including getting a dog and “one or more” children), she speaks devotedly of her small beach house.

Continued at Pt. 4

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Copyright 2000, 2009 ECG