A whirlwind year for ‘Venom’ star Williams

By LINDSEY BAHR

AP Film Writer

LOS ANGELES

Michelle Williams can’t believe it’s been less than a year since “the pay stuff.” Time has seemingly accelerated since last October when, while shooting the comic book movie “Venom,” the unimaginable began to happen: Titans of her industry started to fall under #MeToo. Then months later, after reshoots for “All the Money in the World,” which were hurriedly completed to remove scenes featuring one of the accused, Kevin Spacey, Williams became the center of a very public controversy over a vast pay discrepancy between herself and her co-star Mark Wahlberg. She was paid less than $1,000. He got $1.5 million.

It’s also a year in which she married musician Phil Elverum, and started making some atypical career choices for a four-time Oscar nominee who has in her adulthood always veered toward art house films of directors such as Kelly Reichardt and away from the commercial, from big budgets and from comic-book films such as the one she’s currently promoting.

During a promotional day for her latest film, “Venom,” Williams cranes her neck performativity to look at the somewhat grotesque poster behind her, half of which is star Tom Hardy’s face, and the other half is the tar-like people-eating alien “symbiote” that he becomes. “Nope,” she says. “Doesn’t seem like me!”

But Williams is finding that she’s ready to take some chances and to bet on herself.

“I’m recognizing my own strength and my own worth,” she said. “I’m 38 ,and it’s just happening.”

Plus she wanted to work with Hardy.

“She’s one of the best actors out there working today,” said “Venom” director Ruben Fleischer. He worried that she wouldn’t want to do it, but Williams said she was only flattered by the offer.

“It’s not like people are always asking me to be in these kinds of movies,” Williams said. “I thought it would be fun to try something on a larger scale and to see if I can relax.”

Venom is a character in the Spider-Man comics, and the $100 million film, out Friday, is a part of Sony Pictures’ efforts to create an extended Spider-Man Universe with the Marvel characters they license. (Spidey does not appear in “Venom.”)

Williams plays Anne Weying, the ex-fiance of Hardy’s Eddie Brock. She was able to make the character her own, from the business-like costumes (some of which she shopped for herself) down to the dialogue.