by Gill Pringle in Los Angeles
Just as she was set to play a woman whose libido is wildly awoken following a terminal breast cancer diagnosis in Dying for Sex – Michelle Williams discovered that she was expecting her third child.
“It would be a hard show to make pregnant!” reflects the actress today.
While taking an 18-month break from the project, she still couldn’t shake her desire to bring to life the real-life story of Molly Kochan in what is now, Dying for Sex.
Inspired by a Wondery podcast, the story unfolds as Molly dumps her husband after receiving a Stage IV metastatic breast cancer diagnosis, setting out to explore the full complexity of her sexual desires for the first time in her life, sleeping with nearly 200 men.
In portraying Molly’s quest for sexual satisfaction, Michelle Williams plunged deep into a wildly intimate – and oftentimes hilarious – odyssey.
Having garnered much critical acclaim for playing emotionally troubled women, it’s no surprise that the five-time Oscar nominated actress would be drawn to breaking taboos by showing a woman at her peak of sexual abandonment.
Admittedly, Williams couldn’t quite believe what she was reading when she was first sent Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether’s script.
“I thought it was unlike anything I’d ever seen, to the point where when I did look at it, I thought, ‘Is that what I think it is like?’ Because I’m seeing something for the first time, so I didn’t really know what I could relate it to, and that’s so exciting, because it was like asking something of me that was new; that was unusual,” says the actress who immediately responded to the heartfelt script from the New Girl co-writers.
Delving into Molly’s podcast – created by Molly’s best friend, Nikki Boyer – the story is a testament to friendship, Nikki having supported her friend on this adventure, staying by her side until the very end.
“I fell unremittingly in love with Nikki and Molly’s friendship, and with how much I thought: ‘wow, I haven’t seen a representation of how deep and passionate a best friendship can be’,” says the actress who, likewise, leaned on her own friends in the aftermath of the break-up from her Brokeback Mountain co-star, the late Heath Ledger with whom she has a daughter Matilda, now 19.
Ten years after Ledger’s 2008 tragic death by accidental overdose, she found love again with theatre and TV director Thomas Kail, whom she met while working on Fosse/Verdon in late 2018.
Having since expanded her family, she remained passionate about finally bringing Dying for Sex to the small screen despite conventional wisdom that might say death and sex is a hard sell.
Ask her about her own relationship to death, Williams has a surprising reply: “Well, I can’t say I wrapped my head around it, but I think if I can take this as a lesson that there is a way – she dies like she lives, which is that she is trying in these last months and then moments to find out how to be both receptive and also in charge.”
Offering hope to other women with tough cancer diagnoses, Williams, 44, says, “I think when she [Molly] is given the information of what the progression is in real time and with physicality, how it is going to look and feel like; when you get the information, then you can live inside of the information.
“It’s when the information is kept away from you that you enter this state of confusion and powerlessness,” she says referring to a difficult scene where Molly is told what her future might hold – the real Molly dying in 2019, aged 45.
“That scene alone was an incredible gift; that understanding – and so that inside of that information, in those days, you can construct it in your own way. You know, death itself, that might be a longer discussion, sure, that might be a longer question.
“But the idea of actually being able to bring it into your life, like having a kind of death consciousness and an idea of your own mortality . . .” she says, before volunteering about how she feels the presence of death in her own long-time home in Brooklyn.
“I live in a brownstone, and in these brownstones, they used to have a ‘coffin corner’ – and now, you put a vase there – and it was because death was a part of life. You were born in a house, and maybe you died in the house. And there was this allowance in the curvature of the staircase for a coffin to be brought down the stairs, so it wasn’t as mysterious …. I think about that. I think about a death consciousness as a way for life fullness,” says the former child actress who rose to fame with powerful roles in dramas Blue Valentine, Manchester by the Sea and portraying Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn.
In the role of Molly’s husband Steve, Jay Duplass pulls the short straw as the sort of villain of the piece. But his villainy, in this case, is really about his niceness and martyred role as Molly’s caregiver.
As an audience, we immediately dislike him when the series opens with Molly and Steve in a couple’s therapy session – Steve trying to mansplain why it is they no longer have sex.
It’s no wonder Molly prefers to spend her remaining time with her best friend, played by Jenny Slate.
Duplass recognised instantly that he was going to be the baddie, admitting, “That’s why I took the part, I think Steve absolutely loves Molly and has always loved Molly. I think Steve is awesome. He’s a taskmaster, who is damn good at getting anyone into remission, and he’s damn proud of it.
“I think Steve is very representative of straight white dudes in American culture, who want to win and be rewarded and do good. And I think he’s actually a super nice guy. It’s just that in this case, the task is to give Molly what she wants, and he can’t do it,” says Duplass.
If Dying for Sex might sound somber, then – as portrayed by Williams – instead, it’s a joyous celebration of Molly’s life with a lot of laughs, sex toys and kinky sexual encounters along the way.
Echoing Nicole Kidman’s recent erotic performance in Babygirl, it serves as a tribute to the feminine quest for a satisfying orgasm, Williams committing her full clout to the drama by signing on as an executive producer.
Dying for Sex is streaming now.
