The Fabelmans' Michelle Williams, our latest Oscars predictions, and more in EW's The Awardist

Michelle Williams on The Fabelmans, motherhood, and finding her muse

Interview by Leah Greenblatt
Cover illustration by Jennifer Dionisio

Cloaked in the low-key camouflage of a chic Brooklyn mom — barn jacket, sturdy boots, tasteful knitwear — Michelle Williams slips into a small, bustling cafe near her home, unbothered by a local crowd that either doesn't recognize her or, in the way of all good New Yorkers, respectfully pretends not to. In fact it's been only five weeks since she gave birth to her third child, though there are still a few telltale signs of her day job: Her hair, an ethereal House of the Dragon blonde, holds the remnants of a 1950s bob, and her heart-shaped face emits a certain movie-star bioluminescence, as if she were born with some invisible ring light in tow.

It's that mutable, quietly expressive beauty that has allowed Williams to inhabit roles as varied as a grieving Massachusetts mom (Manchester by the Sea), a platinum screen icon (My Week With Marilyn), and an electric Broadway star (Fosse/Verdon) with unusual, almost supernatural depth and specificity. More recently, she became the beating heart of Steven Spielberg's movie memoir The Fabelmans as Mitzi, a vibrant midcentury housewife who has sublimated her dreams to raise a family. On a bright winter afternoon, the actress, 42, spoke to EW about motherhood, monkeys, and finding her muse.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How does one get summoned to be in a Spielberg movie? I'm guessing it must be a little bit surreal.

MICHELLE WILLIAMS It was deep pandemic, as my husband [director Thomas Kail] says, when we were still washing the mail. We were at home playing with our baby, my phone dinged, and it was my agent saying that Steven wanted to talk to me about something. I gasped and couldn't speak, so I just showed it to my husband, and we were in a mutual fervor for a little while. Then the next day I got all dressed up for the first time in a year or something and got on my Zoom. [Laughs]

You've portrayed real women before, going back to Marilyn Monroe and Gwen Verdon, so pulling a character from life isn't new to you. But they of course were also so well known and documented. You've spoken about being given a full dossier of Mitzi Fabelman materials at the start of this project — home movies and photographs and music. How much was Steven looking for a total embodiment of his mother versus forging your own path with it?

You're trying to get as close as possible, but I don't think anybody's ever looking for a photocopy of the thing. Otherwise, why make it? It's already been made. To recreate something exactly might not be as interesting as it is to gather the essence and see how that moves you and how that works through these given circumstances — this dialogue, this interaction with other characters and other actors. So it's as close as it can be, but it also isn't a documentary.

Really, I just think about the music that she listened to and that she played — the music that moved her, this ecstatic reach for connection. She so completely inhabited the space around her, in front of her, above her, behind her, which feels like the movement of a piece of music. She felt like she was always in motion and she was careening through these ecstatic states from high to low. And I think that's what the great things make us feel.

But yeah, with Marilyn and Gwen, having played people who walked, who were, I've figured out a concise way for me to work is to have everything gathered on an iPad, so that I have a touchstone and something I can keep returning to that's coherent and linear, and can contain videos and photos and audio. They put all of the archives onto an iPad for me, and that just became my companion.

And for every movie that I do, I always keep a notebook. It's the same notebook, and every woman gets a new one. It's like my little briefcase that I take to work with me every day, just a place that I can keep going to and keep connected to.

Binders full of women! Though the story is centered on Sammy [Gabriel LaBelle] as essentially a Steven stand-in, Mitzi becomes the stealth hero of the movie, this passionate dancer and pianist with a real artist's soul and inner conflicts. Did you see all that on the page right away?

I did. When I first read the script, I said to my husband, "They let her live, they let her live." It's a feast, and they laid this table for her. I was so moved by how they ensured she not be limited to her identity as a mother, even though that is so front and center. And that's actually what Steven, I think, is saying with this movie — that all of these characters made him who he is. "My father and his technical prowess made me an artist, my mother and her creative liberty."

But I remember seeing this phrase "There's nothing as dangerous to a child as the unlived lives of their parents." And here's a woman who, in a time when not a lot of other women were allowed or allowing themselves to do this, showed him that you can live full of love and full of bravery. And those two things can actually go hand in hand. She can still love her husband and love these children, but she can feel herself called to a place, and she's not wrong.

As she says it in the most elegant, poetic way at the end of the movie, "You don't owe anyone your life." Because her heart is in the right place, and her heart can be in multiple places.

You definitely break the classic rule about never working with dogs and children here. There are kids all over the place, and even a monkey. Was it chaos?

I love that monkey, she's amazing. I mean, I always say this about animals: They're tremendous scene partners because they're always in the moment, and they can actually really upstage you because they are so transfixing.

You parent a number of child actors on screen here, but did you feel maternal toward Gabriel in particular, being so new to the business and taking on this major role?

Oh, he was fine. He didn't need it. [Laughs] This is such a sidebar, but did you ever watch Lionel Messi, the soccer player? There's this announcer who's obsessed with him. You have to watch him just to increase the joy in your life.

But he comes up with the most idiosyncratic turns of phrase to describe how magnificent he is, and he says this one thing, "He's as cool as the seeds inside the cucumber." Gabriel is so confident, he really trusts himself. And he was 19 when we made this!I had to get to 42 to be able to speak in full sentences around Steven. So the kid's all right.

You bookended the movie by giving birth to two babies, and in between took on this intensely expressive physical role. That seems like a lot to inhabit with your one small body within the space of a few years.

It's amazing because we all do it. That's how every human gets here, is a woman giving of herself. [Babies] have to arrive, and they have to be sustained, all of it. So I'm continuously searching, because balance isn't a stable place. Balance means that you're always adjusting.

So you have to figure it out because we have to stay in the workforce, even though it often feels like it's untenable. My heart obviously belongs to my children; they tug at it the most. But I really want to be able to have both. And I think that it requires deep thought and learning and the support of other women to figure out how to get through it.

I would like to give a shout-out to the Elvie breast pump for being hands-free and not plugging me into the wall so I can pump a bottle of milk for my baby while I'm having lunch with my toddler. [Laughs] That's a big one for me.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

If you are an Entertainment Union or Guild Member, please click here to participate in a brief, 4-question poll on behalf of our team at EW.

Oscars Flashback

The Whale's makeup and prosthetics designer Adrien Morot on getting Brendan Fraser into the role of a lifetime

By Joshua Rothkopf

Even though his work is being recognized now more than ever, Canadian-born makeup designer Adrien Morot would rather it be invisible. "If I'm doing an old-age makeup on an actor," Morot, 52, explains, "and people watch the movie and tell me, 'Beautiful, great job, Adrien,' I feel like I've failed."

These are unlikely words from an Oscar nominee. Yet Morot, the modest wizard behind the transformative work in The Whale, takes more pride in the reviews that single out Brendan Fraser and his career-revising performance — especially the ones that don't mention Morot at all. "That means the makeup was not a distraction," he says. "That's great. That's exactly what I wanted." (He'll hate this article.)

Morot's contribution to The Whale, the creation of a believable 600-pound man, is the opposite of cartoonish. As conceived by original playwright and adapting screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter, Fraser's character, Charlie, a housebound online teacher with little connection to the outside world, grapples with loneliness, grief, and family estrangement. Those conditions needed to be more prominent than his physical ones.

"Brendan is the kindest human being I've ever met," Morot says of the actor who, he remembers, welcomed a collaboration. "He was like, 'You're the expert — I trust you. The only thing that I want is to make sure that it's accurate and respectful. I don't want this to be a joke. I don't want this to be a punchline.'"

Director Darren Aronofsky, with whom Morot has worked on mother!, Noah, and The Fountain, was more specific in setting parameters.

"Darren doesn't normally do movies where his actors are covered in prosthetics," Morot says, "and he might have had some apprehension regarding that. So, he was like, 'I know what you have to do, but I don't want you to interfere with his acting abilities or his facial movement. That's his tool. I want him to be in full control.'"

Morot went to work, sculpting in mediums that were both customary to prosthetic designers, like translucent silicon, and ones that weren't — such as his innovative use of Orbeez pellets, the water-absorbent gelatin beads that kids shoot out of Nerf blasters. (He used them to create a believable substructure.) Meanwhile, with COVID-19 raging, the designer also pushed the limits of 3-D printing, which, in conjunction with full-body scans, allowed for casts to be made without jeopardizing Fraser's safety.

The result was an unprecedented level of control and sensitivity, allowing Morot to fabricate multiple pieces of varying thickness: neck attachments, chest and torso molds, fleshy arms that would extend from the tips of fingers to shoulders. There were even legs and lower-body adornments for specific shots that would test the limits of the illusion. Sometimes the additional weight crept over 200 pounds.

"Nobody else would've went through that," Morot recalls of Fraser's commitment. "Everybody would've run away and called me crazy and gotten me fired. But Brendan used that to actually find his character. We had made a lightweight version of the understructure, and Brendan tried it, but when we were getting ready to dress him up again, he was like, 'You know what? I'm going to go with the heavy one. This is not Charlie.'"

For Morot, it's always been about emotion. He remembers growing up in Montreal, a five-year-old obsessed with Hammer horror movies, then with Fangoria magazine and the '80s-era explosion in practical creature effects showcased in landmark films like John Carpenter's The Thing and David Cronenberg's The Fly. It's impossible not to mention that Morot is also the puppeteer behind the dancing death doll of M3GAN (available to stream on Feb. 24 on Peacock) and will be working on Eli Roth's feature version of his gross-out trailer Thanksgiving.

"I think that's one of the things that's great about this job is that it's never the same," Morot says. He's conversant in all things gooey (as well as the 1986 Bryan Brown thriller F/X, about a makeup artist who fakes an informant's murder — a gateway drug for so many young people into the field). Still, he identifies the subtle jiggle effects of Kazu Hiro, the genius behind Click, Norbit, and Gary Oldman's metamorphosis into Winston Churchill for Darkest Hour, as his deepest inspirations.

"My natural tendency is to go with stuff that's uncanny," he says, pointing to M3GAN's eerieess, the grist of memes. "I'm trying to do stuff that remains tasteful and non-distracting. I see myself more as a tool in the palettes of the director and the actors. I'm there to support them. Unless I'm being asked to do something that's over the top."

Clearly, Morot can do anything, and with the box office and critics conquered — and perhaps AMPAS come March — he will be asked to do it all, and often.

Dave Karger's updated Oscar predictions for 3 major categories

The Directors Guild of America (DGA) and British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) provided several major surprises over the past few days with their awards. So how might those results affect the major Academy Award races? Here are some updated predictions.

Best Picture: Everything Everywhere All at Once

All Quiet on the Western Front, which had the most BAFTA nominations, was still something of a surprise Best Film winner. It certainly has an outside chance to upset at the Oscars, but without a Best Director nomination or any acting nods, it'll be tough. I'm sticking with EEAAO for the win.

Best Director: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once

I've been wavering between the Daniels and The Fabelmans' Steven Spielberg for weeks now. But since the DGA and the Oscars have matched up in eight of the last nine years, the Daniels' big win at Saturday's DGA Awards seals the deal for me. They feel like 21st-century winners to me.

Best Actor: Austin Butler, Elvis

Before this weekend, I had Butler ranked at No. 2 behind The Banshees of Inisherin's Colin Farrell. But his win at the BAFTAs, which have significant overlap with the Academy's voting body, indicates that his showier performance now has the edge.

Check out Joey Nolfi's predictions here

Everything Everywhere's Stephanie Hsu on her mother's reaction to the movie: "She was crying and she pointed to the screen and said, 'That's me'"

By Jessica Wang

In Hollywood terms, Everything Everywhere All at Once, the sci-fi multiverse epic from directing duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as the Daniels), has owned the narrative for months. The reborn Ke Huy Quan seems to be cruising to a pre-ordained Oscar win, Michelle Yeoh is neck and neck with TÁR's Cate Blanchett in Best Actress, and even fancy guilds like the DGA are taking notice.

But the film, a deep meditation on intergenerational trauma, is fortified by costar Stephanie Hsu, who portrays not just Yeoh's estranged daughter, Joy, but Jobu, a nihilistic version of the latter bent on destruction after she's pushed to her breaking point. For Hsu, her powerhouse performance — one that's culminated in an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress — has been years in the making, dating back to her roots in experimental theater.

Below, Hsu, 32, speaks with EW about bringing the immigrant experience to the screen, and her own mother's reaction to the film.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: One of my favorite stories from the press tour has been about the Chinese blessing ceremony the cast and crew had before filming, complete with a traditional suckling pig and incense.

STEPHANIE HSU: What's really beautiful — and this is so Chinese, people — is we are so spiritual. We're a very witchy bunch, actually. They wouldn't call it witchy in our culture, but we're very spiritual. We started filming in January 2020. We wrapped March 16th, whatever that day was that everyone shut down [due to the pandemic lockdown]. We premiered at South By Southwest in March 2022, and now the Oscars are going to be in March 2023. Isn't that wild? So I feel like this year is going to be a full-circle completion.

I really do feel like our movie is blessed in this kind of weird synchronistic, beautiful, magical way. Because no one could have possibly imagined our story could do what it's done. The Daniels really cultivated a beautiful community. We made this impossible movie in 38 days [with] $14.3 million, which is unheard of for this scale of a film. And everybody brought their best because they believed in it and they were in a supportive environment to do their best work. That is what the Daniels are so good at doing. And we all signed on because Michelle is Michelle. She completely surrendered to the process without any ego.

The part came to you after you worked with the Daniels on the series Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens. What was it about the script that resonated with you?

Before I even read the script, before the Daniels told me Michelle Yeoh would play my mom, before they told me A24 was attached, I was like, "Whatever you guys are doing, I'm gonna do it." The Daniels are amazing. I honestly think we really are cut from the same artistic cloth. We're very much best friends and soulmates in so many ways. Working with them on that one episode, I was like, I'm yours for life. Whatever you want me to do, I'm yours.

But then, of course, when I read the script, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it was a story about a mother and a daughter, an immigrant family. I had never seen anything like that before. I came from experimental theater. I have a passion for the craft and storytelling and breaking that open, and I had never seen a character that would allow me to do all that I feel I'm capable of: to be funny, to be wild, to be really small, to be broken. That was the thing that I felt so excited about. I was like, I wanna blow this role open. I wanna stretch it as far as it can go. I want Joy to be so almost forgettable that Jobu is like the wildest surprise ever. Those roles are really hard to come by.

At its core, this multiverse saga is about a mother and daughter. When I first watched the movie, it made me feel like I broke in half. How did you and Michelle build this dynamic?

Well, the thing that's so beautiful about that family relationship is that it really is imperfectly rooted in love, right? So it's a chemistry thing. It's also a Michelle Yeoh thing. She makes everybody feel like family when you work with her. There was something really magical about this little group. I don't know how else to say it, but the moment we met, we felt like family. Michelle does open her arms so wide, and she completely surrendered to all of us. We didn't have rehearsal time. We were really just like doing it as we went. Her love is so big. My love is so big.

And what was really wild was that, both of us, when we were filming, we never talked about identity. We didn't talk about our families, really. I mean, we spoke in Mandarin and it was fun and we ate a lot of Chinese food, and there was definitely a big celebration of like, "Look how awesome it is that we get to just be ourselves and feel so comfortable in the scenario." But when we were talking about the script, we didn't have a roundtable discussion about intergenerational trauma. I think everybody just knew it. We just slipped into it in a way that I think is because it's from our body of experience.

What did your mother think of the film?

She came to the L.A. premiere, and after the movie, she was crying and she pointed to the screen and she said, "That's me." And it was surprising because I thought she was going say, "Oh, that's you." Like, "Ha ha ha, you're that grumpy daughter." But she was crying and she said, "That's me." And I realized that that was the first time my mom had ever seen herself on the screen. And that, to me, is so powerful. I've been on my high horse about intergenerational healing, and that to me felt like a moment where she was also seeing herself represented. A little bit of healing happened to her as well.

Jobu, in my opinion, has one of the best film entrances, with the Elvis outfit and the pig on a leash. Was that a real pig? Was he or she a good scene partner?

They were amazing. I don't remember the gender of the pig. I don't know their pronouns. It was a real pig. Most of our stuff was all practical. That's the magic of it. Even the confetti, when we blew up the police officer's head, was real confetti. They made a puppet basically that would explode into confetti, and I walked through the real confetti, which is part of the amazing thing about making the film. Best entrance in the whole wide world.

The thing I'm most proud of — I mean, I'm proud of so many things — but the thing I'm most proud of specifically with that entrance is, Jobu's not a typical villain. She's funny, she's cool, she doesn't care what you think about her. So typically, the sort of trope about a cool villain is they're smoking a cigarette from the side of their mouth. And I was like: I want her to be so stupid, I want her to smoke the cigarette from the center of her mouth. And for Halloween, so many people noticed it. They took pictures as Jobu with a cigarette at the center of their mouth. I felt really seen.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Check out more from EW's The Awardist, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year's best in TV. If you are an entertainment industry association, guild, or union member, sign up here to receive future EW print issues.

Related content:

• Oscar nominee Judd Hirsch on being the 'alien' of The Fabelmans
• Brendan Fraser says The Whale prosthetics gave him 'sense of respect' for people with larger body types
• Stephanie Hsu says this year's record Oscar nominations for Asian actors represent 'intergenerational healing'