Allison Williams wants to make one thing clear: The girls on Girls were not actually the girls on Girls. In part two of Still Watching’s reconsideration of Lena Dunham’s seminal comedy series, Williams drops by the podcast to revisit all things Marnie Michaels—from how “The Panic in Central Park” has stuck with her, to where she thinks Marnie and the other girls would be in 2024.
Williams is chuffed to see how zoomers are engaging and reexamining Girls, especially because the show’s younger fans seem to have an easier time separating the art from the artist—and her from her character. “People used to come up to me on the street and tell me they hated her, or me,” Williams says. “They were very confused about whether or not we were the same person…. Now her selfishness has been recategorized as self-care, or just like, ‘doing you.’”
While she would never go so far as to say that she and her castmates were treated unfairly, Williams does admit that navigating her 20s while appearing on one of the most zeitgeisty shows of its time had its ups and downs. “It felt awesome to be part of something that people were really digging into and pulling apart, but it was loud. It was just really loud,” she says. “The likelihood of going to some kind of event in New York City where there was going to be media present, and interacting with someone who had just written something glowing and thoughtful and insightful about the show—and then someone who had written something stupid and misogynist and myopic about the show—was equal. You had an equal chance of running into both of those people anywhere.”
Williams also had some thoughts to share about where Marnie might be in 2024, at least emotionally. “I think she’s still searching,” says Williams. “She’s maybe gotten married again, and unmarried again. Maybe she’s still doing music, but it’s not really scratching the itch that she wants it to. I don’t know that she’s come to the realization yet, that all the things she needs and wants are internal. She can’t find them somewhere else. I wish that for her, but I think that might still be coming.” Funnily enough, the actor adds that she was recently chatting with Dunham about what happened to Marnie after the events of the show. “Lena was saying, like, maybe Laurel Canyon,” Williams says. “Maybe she’s moved west. She’s in a sundress somewhere.”
Seven years after the Girls series finale, Williams can comfortably look back on this chapter of her life with incredible fondness. “It was my 20s,” she says. “It was my coming into adulthood. I was doing it in real life and on the show at the same time, and it was just so special.” She name-checks “The Panic in Central Park,” an episode focused on Marnie and her ex-boyfriend Charlie (Christopher Abbott), as one of the more formative experiences from her time on Girls. “I think about so many aspects of [that episode] so often in my other work,” Williams says. “There were so many things I did for the first time during that episode that I’ve done subsequently. Luckily, I haven’t had to walk barefoot through Chinatown again, but if I do, I know what to put on the bottom of my feet…. It’s moleskin.”
