00:00Nothing could deter me from wearing stripes.
00:02I'm from Connecticut.
00:03We're born in stripes, basically.
00:05Hey, Harper's Bazaar, I'm Allison Williams,
00:08and I'm breaking down how I brought some of my characters
00:10to life.
00:11This is building character.
00:14I am OK.
00:16I may not seem OK, and I may not be OK now,
00:18but I am, like, OK.
00:19First up is Marnie Marie Michaels from Girls.
00:23The audition process for Girls, when I look back on it,
00:25it feels like insane coincidence.
00:27But here was the sequence of events.
00:29I made a series of live music videos
00:32with some friends of mine in New York City
00:34the summer after I graduated from college.
00:36I upload the video October 10th or something.
00:41By the 12th, I had my audition for Girls,
00:44because Judd Apatow saw the YouTube video
00:47and was like, that's Marnie.
00:48I was like, obviously, I'm not going to get this audition.
00:51It's my first audition.
00:52And then I found out that they wanted
00:53to send me to New York to test for the show.
00:55We did a table read, and the rest is history.
00:58You could, like, totally make money off how pretty you are.
01:02My gosh, that's so nice.
01:04I mean, I don't think I'm, like, a model.
01:06No, not a model.
01:07No, I wasn't talking about modeling.
01:09Jen Rogan, our costume designer,
01:10was so good at figuring out how to match Marnie's energy
01:15at any given moment in the show to her clothing.
01:18The dress that she wears to the office party to sing stronger
01:22is something that I come across quite a lot.
01:23Like, a B-grade, really small-town real estate ad
01:28was Marnie's style for, like, most of the show.
01:30And I know I'm saying that in this.
01:31So, you know, we're not, like, strangers.
01:34We're cousins.
01:34And then she'd have these, like, boho moments
01:36that were kind of jarring because they didn't come from within.
01:39They were just physical expressions of Desi's aesthetic
01:41later on in the show when she was, like, singing Marnie.
01:44At her core, she's a conservative dresser
01:47who wants to push her boundaries,
01:50but, like, it's not in her heart to do that.
01:53One thing that's fascinating is, like,
01:54the level of resonance of people running into their ex-boyfriends
01:58in a way that reminds them of Panic! and Central Park
02:00is, like, shocking to me.
02:01I'm, like, what is happening out here in the world
02:03of people just, like, bumping into exes
02:05that are, like, maybe on heroin and being, like,
02:08should we for a day?
02:10People talk about it to me as if it's the single most relatable
02:13thing that happened in the show.
02:14And I'm, like, what is the lifestyle that you guys are living
02:17and why didn't I have access to it?
02:19It's very dramatic.
02:20When we were shooting it, I saw it as an almost, like,
02:22dreamlike escape where Marnie was, like,
02:24going through the thought experiment of, like, what if, you know?
02:27But the way people talk to me about it is, like,
02:29they're, like, that feeling when.
02:31And I'm, like, what?
02:32What version, what V life are you guys having?
02:37That's easy, sir.
02:38You just think lovely, wonderful thoughts
02:42and off you go!
02:45Now we're going to talk about Peter Pan from Peter Pan Live.
02:47In 2014? What? It was 2014?
02:5111 years ago, I was flying towards Christopher Walken
02:53and being, like, I hope he's standing where he's supposed
02:55to be standing.
02:56I was auditioning for a whole other movie,
02:58but Neil and Craig, who produced Peter Pan,
03:00were also producing this movie.
03:01And so they were just, like, inundated with videos of me.
03:04And they were in the process of casting Peter Pan.
03:06And they were, like, you know what?
03:07We could offer her Peter Pan.
03:09What they didn't know is that I grew up, like,
03:12obsessed with Peter Pan.
03:14I immediately said yes.
03:16And then they were, like, Christopher Walken's Captain
03:18Hook, and I was, like, oh, my God, that's insane.
03:20And then we started talking about the costume,
03:22because then I was, like, oh, yes,
03:23I'm joining a long tradition of women playing this part.
03:26The practical realities of the costume
03:29are one of the reasons that women so often play Peter Pan.
03:32It's, like, flying and harnesses and all of that stuff
03:35is, you know, anatomically more comfortable.
03:37I remember the moment right before I flew
03:41onto people's live televisions so well.
03:43If a muscle tenses weirdly or if you, like,
03:47let go of the fabric weirdly, you're going to start spinning.
03:51And the question is just how fast and in what direction.
03:54When I landed from that moment and I
03:56had flown in not backwards, I was like, OK,
03:59I can do the rest of this.
04:00This is fine.
04:00As a theater kid at my core, I just wanted to do it right.
04:04I'm really relieved that I did.
04:06Hey, are you ready?
04:08Yeah, yeah, I'm just looking.
04:09Just looking for my camera.
04:10Uh, it's right here.
04:15Now we're going to talk about Rose Armitage
04:17from Get Out in 2017.
04:19Jordan Peele had been writing this script
04:22and had been working on this story for a long time.
04:24He needed someone that, like, the audience
04:26was going to trust right away and then, like,
04:28not think too hard about for the rest of the movie
04:30until it was time for them to be like, wait a second.
04:32He also knew that that person was going to have to be willing to be,
04:35like, among the more villainous people in movies,
04:38like a horrible white supremacist evil person.
04:41He had seen me in Girls and then he saw me in Peter Pan.
04:44He was like, she'll do anything.
04:47That's kind of true.
04:49I was still playing Marnie.
04:50The show was still shooting.
04:51And so this gave me the opportunity to use that
04:56to just lull you into this false sense of like, oh, I know this girl.
04:59And then it's like, no, you don't.
05:00When I think about Rose's costumes,
05:02I guess primarily I think of, like, three.
05:04One is the denim dress that she wears because it's so, like, benign.
05:08It's perfect.
05:08The second one I think of is the red and white striped sweater.
05:11That party scene is so tense and wonderful.
05:14And then the last one I think of is her white button-down Oxford
05:18and her khakis.
05:20So simple.
05:21Does it deter you from wearing stripes?
05:22I would never wear the sweater that Rose wears in Get Out.
05:25I'd just be very clear.
05:27But nothing could deter me from wearing stripes.
05:30I'm from Connecticut.
05:31We're born in stripes, basically.
05:33That is what it is.
05:34But to wear that exact sweater would be a very weird move.
05:38Did you hurt someone?
05:41God, I hope not.
05:43Because if I did, we'd both be in a lot of trouble.
05:45Now we're going to talk about Meghan, my character Gemma, in 2022.
05:48I read the script and I was like, oh, this is perfect.
05:52This is what everyone I know is so worried about that's becoming new parents.
05:56The stress of the intersection between children and technology.
05:59And I was like, this does the same thing that Get Out does,
06:02which is it takes this worry that is so shared
06:04and puts it in this packaging that makes it digestible and talkaboutable
06:08and then, like, puts it out into the world.
06:10I just saw the vision.
06:11I thought Gerard was brilliant.
06:13And I was like, let's do this.
06:14So it was an offer.
06:16And it was the first time I was an official executive producer
06:18on something.
06:19So that was also a milestone for me.
06:23What are you doing?
06:24I was really wrong about the dance.
06:27I read the dance on the page and I was like, I don't get this.
06:30Like, why is she dancing?
06:31Everyone was like, yes.
06:32And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but like, why?
06:34And they were like, I know.
06:35And I was like, what am I missing?
06:38Cut to it's the most iconic part of the movie.
06:40Obviously, once I saw it cut into the movie, I was like, OK,
06:43I do kind of get it.
06:44A paper cutter in a hallway at a tech company, I was like, what?
06:47What are we doing?
06:48But again, like it just all of those choices were so precise, so peculiar.
06:53And that's exactly why they resonated so much.
06:55So then were you totally on board for all the gimmicks in the second one?
06:59I was so on board with her serenading me in the second movie.
07:02Megan is a Marnie.
07:03She sings when no one wants her to.
07:05And in that way, I find her relatable.
07:07And in that way, I made her in my own image.
07:10Lizzie Gardner designed the costumes on the first movie.
07:13But it's more accurate to say that my unborn son designed the costumes
07:17on the first movie.
07:18Because I was pregnant when we filmed the first Megan.
07:20We shot it in my second trimester.
07:22By the end of the movie, it literally looked like I was hiding
07:24a basketball under my sweater.
07:27Going into the second movie with Jerriana San Juan, who did those costumes,
07:30she had gone through a lot in the first movie
07:33and had transformed into kind of a public figure,
07:36all kind of culminating in a few finale-ish looks.
07:40One of them was a sequined dress that she, like, didn't belong in
07:43in the first place and ended up getting stuck in for, like,
07:45a whole chunk of the movie.
07:46I was very obsessed with the silhouette of this dress.
07:49I wanted to look, as the kids say, snatched.
07:52But let's just say I had a fucking baby.
07:54So, like, the silhouette isn't always giving, you know?
07:57So I had Jerriana build a corset into the dress.
08:01And I wore, like, it took, like, ten minutes just to get the under
08:05stuff on for this costume.
08:06On the last day, I was like, it's the last day.
08:10We're sitting in a car.
08:11I'm not putting all the unders on.
08:13I got a little lazy, I'm not going to lie.
08:14And I just put the dress on without all of the unders.
08:17It looked identical.
08:18I want those breaths back.
08:21Clara Grant!
08:22That can't be good.
08:23Get in the car!
08:26One second.
08:27And now we're going to talk about Morgan Grant from Regretting You.
08:30This is a genre that is, like, completely foreign land to me.
08:33I haven't been in romance world before or drama or anything like that.
08:37Becoming a mom definitely helped, like, unlock a part of me.
08:41I could pretend that part, but it felt, like, deeply accessible to me because of the fact
08:46that I was actually a mom.
08:47I didn't become a mom at 17, though.
08:49There was, like, an imagination leap required to be able to play Morgan, who's raising a 17-year-old
08:56girl and ushering her through these very treacherous waters of teenage years and going off to college
09:01and first loves and all of those things while processing a deep loss that is complicated,
09:07to say the least.
09:08Sometimes it scares me how good of a liar you are.
09:10I am in the Colleen Hoover fandom, and so I know what it means to finish one of her books
09:15and the way you feel linked to these characters.
09:19So to be part of the crew that's like, okay, the definitive Morgan house is here, the definitive
09:25cast is here, whatever was in your mind's eye, wipe it out, replace it with this.
09:29Like, I don't know, that's intimidating.
09:31We really did our best to try to, like, be faithful to the source material, which we loved.
09:35I'm biased, but I do think we did a good job of adapting what's there and making it
09:42three-dimensional.
09:43And I hope people agree.
09:46Thank you so much for watching, and please go see Regretting You.
09:49We're really proud of it.
09:50I hope you like it.
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