On April 2, Michelle Williams, in a plunging pastel Proenza Schouler gown, enjoyed a rare public night out in New York with her husband, producer and director Thomas Kail, at the premiere of her new miniseries, Dying for Sex.
Just weeks earlier, the couple had welcomed their fourth child via surrogate. Williams is already mum to daughter Matilda, 19, whose dad is the late actor Heath Ledger, and with Kail, she shares son Hart, 4, and a third child born in 2022.
“They couldn’t be happier to expand their family,” a source told People. “And Matilda has been doting on her younger siblings.”
Dying For Sex, created by New Girl writers Elizabeth Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock, with Australian filmmaker Shannon Murphy directing six out of the eight episodes, is the first project that five-time Oscar nominee Williams, 44, has tackled after taking a few years off from acting to spend time with her young family.
The dramedy is based on the podcast of the same name, hosted by Nikki Boyer about the real-life story of her best friend, Molly Kochan, who, after receiving a diagnosis of Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, left her husband of 15 years and decided to live whatever days she had left in pursuit of sexual awakening and pleasure.
“[She] turned to her best friend and said, ‘I want to die with you,’ and proceeds to go on what I guess I would term as a sexual healing journey as a path to self-discovery, healing and ultimately a way to be in her body and to express herself fully,” Williams outlined the plot during an April 1 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “This was this woman’s brave path, this was her choice, this was her journey.”
Listening to the podcast, released in 2020, a year after Kochan’s death, Williams was deeply moved. “It destroyed me,” she told Vulture. “It’s not often that you get such a strong emotional reaction. You like things, you can admire things, you can be provoked by things. But to be just obliterated by something? I can’t know when I last had that experience.”
Despite the hot-button themes of sex and death, a large part of the project’s appeal for Williams was about celebrating Kochan and Boyer’s close bond, which she aims to recreate with co-star Jenny Slate.
“We bring to it our own experience of our own best friendships that feel so deep in a way that I don’t know how to articulate,” Williams told Vanity Fair. “You don’t get to see that much, how actually passionate that best-friendship relationship can be. It’s more passionate than people give it credit for. It’s more of a deep love affair that just doesn’t have a sexual component, but it’s a love attachment – not a casual coffee date.”
Williams has famously been best friends with actress Busy Philipps since the pair met filming Dawson’s Creek 25 years ago.
“We just know each other and get each other in such a deep, fundamental way at this point,” Philipps told Page Six, noting that during their friendship they have “been there through so many different moments in each other’s lives”, from the “really wonderful ones” to those they thought they “might never, ever recover from”.
Philipps, who is Matilda’s godmother, was a pillar of strength for Williams after Ledger was found dead of an accidental drug overdose in January 2008, just months after he and Williams had ended their three-year relationship.
After romances with director Spike Jonze, actor Jason Segel, author Jonathan Safran Foer and businessman Andrew Youmans, Williams tied the knot with musician Phil Elverum in July 2018 in New York State’s Adirondacks mountains.
The two quietly separated in early 2019, and eight months later, Williams became pregnant and engaged to Hamilton director Kail, whom she met on the set of Fosse/Verdon.
“I like to go heart first into the great unknown and I think that I fall in love and then I see where it leads,” Williams told Colbert. “I’ve come to know this about myself – I’m a leap-and-then-look kind of person. And that’s how I find myself in all sorts of wonderful situations.”
Asked on the Dying for Sex red carpet if she was nervous about audiences seeing the show’s most risqué and vulnerable scenes, Williams was philosophical. “I knew what I signed up for,” she told Page Six.
“I just kind of take a deep breath and hope that this thing that I’m interested in, for whatever reason, that I find particularly moving and funny has a place in other people’s lives as well. I’ve been hearing women saying, ‘We’re going to have a viewing party, we’re going to be watching this together,’ and that’s really exciting for me to feel like I’m a part of something that people connect to.”
Stream Dying for Sex now on Disney+ from $15.99/month. Subscribe here.
