Allison Williams Comes Alive

The star of the already viral M3gan has made a career of subverting her own image.

- By Rachel Handler

On a chilly Monday afternoon in November, sequestered in a windowless private dining room at the American Girl Café in midtown, Allison Williams and I are celebrating a birthday. We just aren’t sure whose. ¶ Lit like a Duane Reade and seemingly decorated by a tween inspired by Pinterest photos of corporate break rooms, the space is mostly empty except for two American Girl dolls in little pink high chairs at our table. The dolls are a nod to the subject of Williams’s latest movie, M3gan, about an angelic-looking robot that goes on a rather artful murdering spree. But here they are inexplicably set up in a birthday-theme tableau: tiny gifts, party hats, flowers. After Williams and I confirm with each other that it’s neither of our birthdays, we sit down and dutifully put on the pink paper crowns reading celebrate! that have been placed in front of our chairs. Williams stares at the dolls. “What were they doing right before we walked in?” she asks. On a large flat-screen TV, a stop-motion film starring several of the brand’s dolls politely engaging in various wintertime activities plays on a loop.

Our server enters and asks whose birthday we’re celebrating. Williams points at the $115 toy sitting next to her. “It’s this doll’s birthday,” she says with zero traceable irony—traceable being the key word. Williams then produces the winsome, Ralph Lauren–ad smile that, to a degree, is responsible for her career thus far. It’s a smile she has employed in extreme earnest (as a YouTube singing sensation in her postcollege days, as an impassioned Peter Pan on live TV, and as Kit Snicket in Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events) and as a clever tool of misdirection (in Girls, Get Out,