We all know M3GAN—the singing, dancing, J.Crew-dressed robot girl—carries the new horror movie M3GAN. Life-sized humans have been dressing up and dancing like her! That plasticky smirk has landed on billboards all over the world! Her name is the title of the movie! But there’s another leading lady we also need to talk about, when it comes to Blumhouse’s picture-perfect thriller: Allison Williams.
Williams, who became a household name thanks to her high-strung performance as Marnie on HBO’s Girls, has dipped in and out of the public eye over the last few years. After Girls wrapped in spring 2017, the actress traded in covers of Kanye West and bickering with Lena Dunham for a role in Jordan Peele’s splashy debut feature, Get Out, released that summer.
Produced under the same banner as M3GAN, the Oscar-winning psychological horror proved a handful of different things: Peele is a mastermind in the director’s chair, the Academy was finally warming up to 21st-century horror, and Williams is the creepiest millennial scream queen. In Get Out, she still embodied sleek, uptight Marnie Michaels, but now her emotional manipulation was being played for shrieks instead of laughs. The way she deconstructs her cereal—eating a dry bowl of Froot Loops, then sipping milk through a straw—will creep back into my mind every once in a while, as I prepare my normal breakfast.
It’s no surprise, then, that Williams conquers her role in M3GAN. Though she’s no longer an antagonist, her hands aren’t exactly clean of all blood throughout the horror flick. She stars as Gemma, the aunt of orphaned Cady (Violet McGraw) and inventor at a toy company. She loves robots in particular—a menacing fixation to have in the case of this movie, where an animatronic doll begins to take over the world.
Though M3GAN (played by Amie McDonald, voiced by Jenna Davis) is the star here, Allison Williams takes no prisoners. When Cady, who’s just witnessed the brutal death of both her parents in a snowplow car crash, fiddles with a toy prominently placed on a shelf in Gemma’s house, Gemma nearly smacks this poor child in disgust. It’s a collectible, she says. You can’t play with those. It’s a perfect character-defining moment. Here is this brilliant, beautiful woman, yapping about toy boxes. It’s hard to imagine sophisticated Marnie bitching about knickknacks, but Williams nails it.
Though Gemma’s role is a bit more sincere than those around her—i.e., the spiraling robot girl, or her rabid boss—the fact that she’s able to play off the absurdity with such finesse is incredible. “It’s finally time for us to kick Hasbro in the dick,” Gemma’s boss David (Ronny Chieng) howls, as she presents the refined M3GAN doll to him. Instead of responding, she chuckles and continues the demonstration. Right, because if your boss said this, you would be completely unfazed.
Williams excels in the gruesome scenes just as well as she does with the comedy, a dichotomy which M3GAN balances perfectly. In the final fight sequence, Williams is battered, struggling to keep going, as she throws pipes at M3GAN. Meanwhile, the bot nastily roasts her creator. I imagine it’s not easy to battle an animatronic doll in earnest. But Williams puts her all into every fight she has with M3GAN.
Williams has given us more reasons to hop on the fan train lately, outside of the movie itself. In the wake of New York Magazine’s polarizing “How a Nepo Baby is Born” cover story, the actress spoke about her own take on nepotism in multiple profiles spotlighting M3GAN. As the daughter of NBC news anchor Brian Williams, she’s told interviewers that “there’s no conversation about my career without talking about the ways in which I have been fortunate.”
“It doesn’t feel like a loss to admit it,” she told Wired in a recent interview. “If you trust your own skill, I think it becomes very simple to acknowledge.”
Where does the actress go next after flinging her entire heart and soul into M3GAN? In that same Wired profile, the actress revealed that she’s interested in getting more involved on the creative side of movies like she did on M3GAN, working as a producer. As long as she’s not planning a sequel to Peter Pan Live!, count us in. If she keeps working in horror films, all the better—be them campy like M3GAN or thought-provoking like Get Out.
But there’s also a more obvious answer for what Williams should add to her to-do list: Make more M3GAN movies. The producers are already in talks for sequels, and after this film’s projected $17-20 million opening weekend at the box office, we can only imagine Blumhouse will order eight more M3GAN installations. Hopefully, those will include our beloved Allison Williams as Gemma. Wouldn’t it be fun to get a backstory on why Gemma got so involved with robots, and whatever nightmarish things happened with M3GAN’s predecessor, BRUCE? Or give us more of her duking it out with a tiny robot living in every system of her house. Either way, she’s the perfect fit for the M3GAN universe.
