Summary

Welcome to a new episode of Collider Ladies Night with M3GAN 2.0 star and producer Allison Williams.

During her Ladies Night conversation with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, Williams looks back on first discovering her passion for improv, starring in Girls, making Get Out and more.

She also discusses becoming a full producer on M3GAN 2.0, the film’s epic ending, and where the franchise could go from here.

Allison Williams’ filmography is loaded with variety, but it’s also packed with examples of how one project can influence another — even if they’re in entirely different genres. There’s the hit HBO comedy-drama series Girls, which first sent Williams’ star skyrocketing. As that show wound down, Williams headlined a feature film for the very first time, Jordan Peele’s Academy Award-winning horror movie Get Out. Williams continued to enjoy great success in the genre, but wound up exploring an entirely different corner of it with the horror-comedy M3GAN. Now, M3GAN 2.0 let’s her do just that yet again as the horror-comedy concept becomes a horror-comedy-action film. M3GAN 2.0 picks up about two years after the events of the original film. Since Gemma’s (Williams) A.I. creation went on a murderous rampage, she’s put her focus on advocating for government oversight of artificial intelligence. However, when Gemma discovers that the M3gan tech wasn’t entirely destroyed and was used to create a military-grade weapon called Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), she’s left with no choice but to resurrect and team up with M3gan to stop Amelia from growing too far beyond the control of her human creators. With M3GAN 2.0 now playing in theaters nationwide, Williams joined me for a Collider Ladies Night conversation to retrace her journey in film and television thus far, and to dig into how her craft in front of and behind the lens has evolved.
It’s All About Improv for Allison Williams

“That became the meat of my college experience and is, to this day … the extent of my acting training.”

As Williams explained, she’s always been drawn to acting, but her parents didn’t want her jumping into the industry too young. “[They] were eager to have a little pause, as much time cooking as possible before I entered this field professionally.” She added, “They made this goal for me of reaching college graduation before pursuing acting professionally.” And it’s a good thing they did because college is where Williams figured out what approach to acting was the best fit. While Williams opted to get a degree in English at Yale University, she did look for ways to scratch the acting itch while there. Her first attempt? Auditioning for the school’s “main stage musical” during her freshman year. She recalled:
“I was delivered a rude awakening. Basically, these were fully professional. They had gone to all of the summer camps that are super impressive that produce the Ben Platts of the world, and they are showing up to this school with full books of songs they know and headshots and scenes that they’re prepared to do, and I wasn’t in that kind of place, so I did not get a part in this musical. It was a clear lesson of, I had gone from being a big fish in a small pond to a tiny fish in a gigantic ocean, and I was feeling very sad that I hadn’t gotten a part, and very rejected.”
Cue the saying, “When one door closes, another one opens.” Williams didn’t get a role in the musical, but an opportunity elsewhere was on the horizon. Williams opted to combat the heartbreak of such rejection by accepting a friend’s invitation to an improv show. From there, everything changed.
“I had watched Whose Line Is It Anyway?, but I had never really gone to a UCB show or Groundlings show or anything like that. It was the first time I’d seen an improv show in person, and I was just completely transfixed by this skill set. I then forgot all of my sadness about the musical and instead just became laser-focused, ‘I have to get into this group. I have to learn how to do this.’ They held auditions the following week. It was their recruiting show to do exactly what it did to me, ignite a deep-burning fire in me that I needed to get in, and I was one of three freshmen that was tapped for the group. That became the meat of my college experience and is, to this day, with the exception of one Auditioning for Camera class, the extent of my acting training.”

That Time That ‘Girls’ and ‘Get Out’ Crossed Over

“It’s kind of a horror movie-coded scene.”

Image via Universal Pictures

Improv continued to be the backbone of Williams’ approach to her work as an actor throughout Girls’ six-season run. When asked for a performance technique she leaned on in Season 1, and a new one she first started to embrace in Season 6, Williams happily proclaimed:
“The only answer to both is improv, because I don’t have any formal techniques to speak of. I don’t have other techniques. The only technique I have is improv. [Laughs] That’s it. That’s really all I have in my toolbox. So, in the beginning, it was useful to just loosen up because I was nervous all the time. It’s nerve-wracking. You’re shooting an HBO show. It’s your first job on camera. That’s stressful. And so loosening something up a little bit and bravely offering an idea felt like a good technique to fall back on in terms of being able to get to the heart of what the scene was about and what Marnie was going through at any given moment.”
While improv remained a key factor during the final season, an acting opportunity outside of Girls wound up helping Williams crack a tough scene in Season 6.
“The last season we shot right after I had done Get Out. It’s not totally a technique, it’s just like a logistical thing, but when I was playing Rose’s evil true self, which we called ‘Ro’ in Get Out, I’d go be by myself somewhere so that I could just stay in a very hateful place, because that was hard. Anytime I saw a crew member or a cast member, I was like, ‘I love you. I can’t hate you.’ [Laughs] But I had to be in that place. So, when I came back to shoot Girls, there’s a scene where we go upstate with Desi, and it’s kind of a horror movie-coded scene, and then I have a big meltdown afterwards. To get into that emotional place for the first time after shooting Get Out, I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I should just go be by myself somewhere.’ And then I did, and it was super helpful.”

That Time ‘Get Out’ and ‘M3GAN 2.0’ Crossed Over

“Everything surprised me about that.”

Related

‘M3GAN 2.0’ Ending Explained: Does the Killer AI Doll Live to Slay Another Day?

Hold onto your… well, you know.

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for M3GAN 2.0.]Get Out proved to be the gift that kept on giving. Toward the tail end of M3GAN 2.0, Williams is presented with an especially exciting performance challenge and absolutely soars with it. Christian (Aristotle Athari) forces Gemma to be fitted with Alton Appleton’s (Jemaine Clement) neural chip. While Christian hopes to use the device to force Gemma to do his bidding, M3gan has other plans. She hacks into the device and teams up with her creator to continue the fight. This essentially means that, for a period of time, Williams gets the opportunity to play both Gemma and M3gan. When asked how one begins to tackle something like that, Williams insisted, “Everything surprised me about that.” However, there was one past experience that came in handy – her work in Get Out.
“The only thing that prepared me is, in Get Out, there’s a scene where I am on the phone and my voice is panicked and emotional, and my face is stone-faced, and that was the only thing that felt like it came close to what I had to do. In this sequence, M3GAN is in a neural chip in my head, so I have her with me, essentially, and I go through multiple stages of consciousness while she’s in there.”

Image Via Universal

Williams continued by walking me through the various phases of the sequence:
“I start off being aware of her and alert, and ask her to take control of my body, so then Gemma is watching M3gan do things with my body that I, Allison, was obviously doing, but I had to watch myself do it as if I was shocked that I was doing the things I was doing. That was very hard. Then she’s in my head and operating while I’m unconscious for a little while, and that was also very complicated to just be kind of passed out and doing fight choreography. Then, the last one is, she speaks through my voice box at one point, when Cady runs into the room, and that was something I did for hours and hours in the Photo Booth camera on the MacBook. Hours and hours, sending them to Gerard and being like, ‘Is this it? Is this what it should be like? How much of a M3gan impression am I doing? Is it more the vibe or is it the voice? Are we putting Jenna’s voice in here later?’ What we ended up in the movie with I’m very happy about.”
Williams should be very pleased with the results. It’s a major highlight of the movie, and a concept I’m hoping they return to as the franchise continues. Looking for even more from Williams on her journey from her improv comedy troupe to Girls and producing M3GAN 2.0? Be sure to catch our full chat in the video at the top of this article, or you can listen to the interview in podcast form below:

M3GAN 2.0

Release Date

June 27, 2025

Runtime

119 Minutes

Director

Gerard Johnstone

Writers

Gerard Johnstone, James Wan, Akela Cooper

M3GAN 2.0 is in theaters now. Get Tickets