Actress Michelle Williams speaks openly with Newsweek Magazine about her latest role and keeping her daughter out of the spotlight.
Here are the highlights of the interview:
About Heath’s early passing:
“It’s so sad,” Michelle says. When she’s asked about how she’s been doing in the past year, she’s silent for a very long time. “I guess it’s always changing,” she says. There’s another pause. “What else can I say?” Her voice is breathy and fragile, and she takes a few gulps of air. “I just wake up each day in a slightly different place—grief is like a moving river, so that’s what I mean by ‘it’s always changing’.” She stops again. “It’s a strange thing to say”—her words unravel slowly, her eyes tear up—”because I’m at heart an optimistic person, but I would say in some ways it just gets worse. It’s just that the more time that passes, the more you miss someone. In some ways it gets worse. That’s what I would say.”
On the Paparazzi:
“It burns a fire inside of me, the s––– that I’ve seen people do to get at me or my daughter,” she says. “I won’t forget it, and I won’t support it. I don’t want my daughter growing up feeling spied on or threatened.”
On quitting acting to keep her life private:
“If it gets to the point where I can’t situate my life in a way that they stay away more, then I’ll drop a match on the thing,” she says. “I’ll be sad. I like to act. It’s saved my life over and over again. It’s given me a sense of self-esteem, and self-worth. I have this thing that I’m in love with—acting—and now it has this baggage.”
On keeping Matilda’s life stable:
“I don’t want to work while she’s in school,” Williams says. “I want her to have a routine. I want the plainest, simplest, most ordinary, habituated routine possible. I just want to know what’s coming next.
