Michelle Williams channels Marilyn Monroe in ‘My Week With Marilyn’

For six seasons, she played the beautiful yet complicated Jen Lindley on Dawson’s Creek. Flash forward t0 2011 and this teenager is now a woman in her thirties with many award nominations, including an Oscar nod for her turn as a lonely, trapped wife in Brokeback Mountain.

Now, after playing these deeply depressing characters, she is beginning to embrace her “new life,” which can only come from growing up and understanding who she is. It doesn’t hurt that she was chosen to play iconic sexpot/actress, Marilyn Monroe in the film My Week With Marilyn. But what hides underneath this willowy, Mia  Farrow-esque actress? “I think Nabokov once said that genius is finding the invisible link between things.  And that’s how I choose to see life. Everything’s connected, and everything has meaning if you look for it.” 

The idea of playing such an iconic figure was daunting. “As soon as I finished the script, I knew that I wanted to do it, and then I spent six months trying to talk myself out of it,” she says. “But I always knew that I never really had a choice. I’ve started to believe that you get the piece of material that you were ready for.”

She’s also intrigued by Monroe’s way of being both an adult and a little girl, a dichotomy hard to genuinely find in this world. “I’ve always thought of her as that woman-child, not an icon, which is probably why I let myself approach the role.”  Read more