Allison Williams on how 'Get Out' can be informative to white audiences, what she kept from the set of 'Girls'
She also reveals what she kept from the set of HBO's "Girls."
— -- Allison Williams wants you to know that she’s not Marnie from HBO’s “Girls” anymore. And she’s even dyed her hair blonde to make it easier to tell the difference.
“It was for a magazine cover and also just to help train my mind to know that I’m not her anymore,” she said of her new hairstyle with a smile. “She’s gone. She’s gone now.”
On “Girls,” which is in its sixth and final season, Williams said she often found it frustrating to play Marnie.
“Because it was this feeling of knowing better from a bird’s eye view and then still having to do it. So anytime she slept with someone’s ex, anytime she was unfaithful,” Williams, 28, said in an interview on ABC News’ “Popcorn with Peter Travers.” “She has this one Achilles' heel ... which is just the entire category of men.”
Watch the full interview with Allison Williams on ABC News' "Popcorn with Peter Travers" on ABOVE.
As filming for the show reached its conclusion, Williams said that as much as she loved the role, she was ready to let Marnie go. But not before she took a few items from the set.
“I bought -- at a very good price -- Marnie’s wedding band and engagement ring from the set, and I have a lot of her clothes,” she said.
Now, Williams has made the jump from television to the big screen with the box-office hit “Get Out.” The movie, directed by Jordan Peele and starring Daniel Kaluuya as her black boyfriend, is her first feature film.
Williams plays the character Rose Armitage, who brings her black boyfriend Chris Washington home to meet her white liberal parents. Rose tells Chris that her parents don’t know he is black, and after they meet, she notices her family is acting abnormally around Chris.
Williams acknowledged the idea that “Get Out” is also a representation of white liberal elitism and the co-opting of black culture.
“Like the idea that … a woman can just go up and feel [Chris’] muscles. That transgression of privacy and personal space is just somehow entitled to her by the virtue of their different races. The idea that you’re the object of voyeurism, that white gaze,” she said.
She hopes audiences can see a different perspective from the film, which some say puts a new spin on the conventional horror genre.
“The amazing thing that Jordan Peele does is that he positions the audience in Chris’ shoes, so already he’s subverting the horror genre in a major way,” Williams said. “So for white audiences, it’s sort of informative of what may feel uncomfortable in a social situation, and they might not be aware of it already.
“Like don’t just mention Tiger Woods to a black guy,” Williams added, referencing the movie’s cocktail party scene. “Ask yourself, ‘Would I say this to a white person?’ If the answer is ‘no,’ probably don’t say it to a black person.”
Without given too many spoilers away, Williams joked that her character represents “the whitest girl ever created.”
“I am a proud representative in this movie of what is probably the whitest girl ever created,” Williams said laughing. “I went to the Nature Center Preschool in New Canaan, Connecticut. I went to New Canaan Country School in New Canaan, Connecticut. I went to Greenwich Academy in Greenwich, Connecticut. Then I went to Yale.”
Growing up, Williams said she knew she wanted to be an actress almost all of her life, which she made very clear to her parents at a young age.
“It was something they knew I wanted to do so they started preparing because they had a feeling they had a little actress on their hands,” Williams said. “I made it pretty clear: I went to school in dress-up clothes, and I spoke in an [English] accent most of the day.”
Growing up, Julie Andrews was one of Williams’ biggest influences. She finally met her idol, after her parents pushed her to go up to the “Sound of Music” star on the red carpet.
“We are going to force you to do this because you have been watching her do her job since you were an infant,” Williams recalled. “And so I did. I went up to her and said, ‘This won’t mean anything to you, but I wouldn’t be doing what I do without you.’”
Her parents wanted her to go to college before pursuing a career in the arts, she said. Williams went to Yale, where she majored in English, took mainly anthropology classes, joined an improv group and appeared in musicals.
Williams said she got advice about college from Meryl Streep while working as a production assistant on her film “A Prairie Home Companion.”
“She told me that, if I was going to go to college, I should study as much as I can, be ravenous and selfish about it. And do theater, do acting, but don’t necessarily study it then,” said Williams.
Even after graduating college, Williams said she still struggled to find her footing in the acting world. When she moved to Los Angeles, she thought of becoming an Ikea furniture assembler for money and working as a tutor.
Before a YouTube video of her rendition of the theme song to AMC’s “Mad Men” helped get her the role of Marnie on “Girls,” Williams spent much of her time behind the scenes of movie sets.
She also worked as a second assistant to Tina Fey and as a utility stand-in on the pilot of HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire.”
Williams said she’s “done every job that gets yelled at” and “every job that gets to set earliest.”
“Once you have that under your belt, going on stage as an actress is an entirely different experience because there’s so much gratitude,” Williams said. “There’s so much awareness of the fact that people are there hours before you get there and hours after you leave. … And so once you have that, you’re not going to keep people waiting. You’re not going to be rude or snappy.”
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