Michelle Williams speaks of dealing with Heath’s death and the Paparazzi
Posted on November 23rd, 2008 by Hot Momma
Michelle Williams sat down with Newsweek as part of the promo tour for her new independent movie, Wendy and Lucy which opens on December 10. The interviewer was able to coax Michelle who has been quietly dating director Spike Jonze, to talk about dealing with Heath Ledger’s death:
Williams is jovial and chatty, until the conversation turns to Heath. You can see it’s still difficult for her to talk about him, and she hasn’t done so publicly until now. The first time Ledger’s name comes up, she bursts into tears. “It’s so sad,” Williams 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.”
Michelle also speaks about the intrusive 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.” She can’t understand how many more pictures people need of her holding a coffee cup in one hand and Matilda in the other. Williams is especially enraged at female photographers, because she thinks women should be protective of mothers. She tried to give a particularly aggressive paparazzo career advice recently. “I said, ‘You’re better than this. Look at you! You’re young, you’re able-bodied, you have a brightness in your eyes. You’re above this.’ But you know what? She didn’t go away.”
Michelle goes on to say she’ll seriously consider quitting acting, if that’s what it takes to get her life back, “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. 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, self-worth. I have this thing that I’m in love with—acting—and now it has this baggage.”
She also reveals that she’s definitely taking the next year off to focus on Matilda.
Here is Michelle in the video trailer for Wendy and Lucy. She stars as the cash-strapped, downtrodden Wendy (Lucy’s her dog), whose already crappy-seeming life gets worse when her car breaks down on the way to Alaska. There’s awards buzz around Williams’s performance:
