Oscar-nominated actress Michelle Williams has said her latest film role took her “to the last place on Earth that you want to go”.
Michelle has already scored Bafta and Golden Globes nominations for her role in Manchester By The Sea and will likely add a fourth nod from the Academy to that list for her performance as a mother shattered by grief.
She plays Randi, a woman in a happy relationship with her husband, played by Oscar frontrunner Casey Affleck, until a tragedy destroys their marriage.
The former Dawson’s Creek star said the film was a gruelling endeavour, telling the Press Association: “It’s really unpleasant, it makes you go to the place that is the last place on Earth that you want to go, it’s the place you constantly want to avoid, it’s the place you don’t want to think about and it makes you go there.”
Michelle, 36, experienced her own tragedy when Heath Ledger, the father of her daughter Matilda, died from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs in 2008, and she said the dark subject matter of the script stayed with her throughout filming.
She said: “It was a little bit there all the time and in some ways, to be able to work on something while you’re running errands or you’re in line at the grocery store or driving to pick up your kid from school, to have something to meditate on and prepare for, in an inactive sort of way, is actually really pleasant because it mixes your real life with your work life so I didn’t mind keeping it on a simmer in my mind.
“You feel really safe but then, it’s when you take the train to Boston and this feeling of dread hits you as you get closer and closer to the set.
“You just think ‘man, I don’t want to do this day’ and I hope it starts to hail and then I can go home and not have to do this scene and it turns out everyone else was feeling that way too because I would get there and they would say ‘we have decided not to shoot that scene and you can go home’.
“It felt like a little death march getting to that last scene Casey and I do at the end.
“We really didn’t want to and then there was no more time and we literally had to do it and once again I readied myself for it and it’s there and there is nothing you can do to escape it any more and you have to confront everything happening in that moment between those two people, all your fears and insecurities about the scene, and there is no turning back any more.”
Manchester By The Sea is released in UK cinemas today.
