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.
“Okay,” the server says. “I’m going to do a little candle for you.” “Thank you,” says Williams. “We’ll see if she can blow it out.”
After Girls, Williams decided to use the audience’s expectations to her advantage.
Almost everything she has done since has been a considered exercise in leveraging and subverting the idea of “Allison Williams.”
once she’d persuaded the moviegoing public to be suspicious of her, she exploited that lack of trust to play Charlotte,
a brittle and damaged woman who initially seems like the villain but is later revealed to be a complicated heroine, in Netflix’s The Perfection.
A lesson I learned from going from Girls and Peter Pan to Get Out was, like, Oh, we deployed this thing against the audience — and it worked. People come in wary of me, and that is really cool,” she says.