Michelle Williams is appreciative of the “stability” that Dawson’s Creek offered her as a teenager.
The five-time Oscar-nominated actress looked back at her early career days during a recent interview on the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard podcast.
Williams scored her breakout role at age 16 as Jen Lindley in Dawson’s Creek, shortly after becoming legally emancipated and living on her own in Los Angeles. Host Dax Shepard recalled how she once said, “There’s a lot of scary people or dangerous people in L.A., and I met many of them” during that time.
That’s why she was notably grateful once she got cast in the teen drama. “I thank God that I got that show, and that it plucked me out and landed me in this sleepy southern coastal town, and that I had a job to go to and a place to be responsible to and met a few people there that are still in my life, that I love very much, that are so much a part of me, and had some kind of stability,” she said of filming in Wilmington, North Carolina.
The Dying for Sex star added that she was also “so excited” for the role because of the “mass rejection” that child actors constantly face. “When you go on so many auditions and you get down to the wire on things, there’s so many heartbreaks that you go through as a child actor, the things that you almost get or the things that you never hear from again, even though you wanted them so badly,” she explained. “Our heart endures a lot when you are a kid trying to deal with mass rejection daily.”
Shepard later asked Williams if there was any tension between having a “great, safe job” with Dawson’s Creek and other projects she was “dying to be in.”
“No, because there was room for both,” she responded. “I did this movie when I was young, called Me Without You, that shot in the UK, and they accommodated it in our [Dawson’s Creek] work schedule to allow me to go back and forth to do this movie that I was dying to do. It’s also not like I was getting a million offers to go do other things.”
Having starred on Dawson’s Creek for six seasons, from 1998 to 2003, Williams also explained that she got “lucky” not to get typecast because of her character on the teen drama, as she sought out heavier roles to advance her career.
“I didn’t really think in the future like that, necessarily,” she explained. “I wasn’t career-focused, I was just finding myself yearning for something, drawn towards it, living in all the desire for it and then would occasionally have the opportunity to do it and be given these chances. Some of it, I think I got lucky,
like they didn’t even know what Dawson’s Creek was.”
The series also starred James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson.
