‘I’ve done any and all number of sexual situations in my 30-year career,” says Michelle Williams, all matter-of-fact and puckishly charming. “But I’ve never masturbated on film before … and I was nervous. It’s much easier to portray mutual desire than just the desire for oneself. But God, when Liz [Meriwether] wrote those scenes – when Molly’s alone in the hotel and by the end she’s masturbating to anything, masturbating to a fish in a bowl! – I thought: ‘Oh Liz. You’ve really done it.’”
In Williams’s new show, Dying for Sex, she spends one entire episode masturbating – a staggeringly unusual thing for a woman to do on screen. Dying for Sex has a very simple premise, so grab-you-by-the-throat tragic that you’d almost take against it. Except it’s based on a true story, which was made into a podcast. Molly is 42, and in remission from a bout of cancer that has robbed her of the marital sex life that wasn’t all that anyway, when she gets the news that the cancer has come back, and is terminal. A palliative care nurse – brilliantly played by Esco Jouley – asks her about a bucket list. Her initial resistance gives way to the realisation that she’s never had an orgasm with another person, and that’s all she wants. So she leaves her husband to spend the rest of her short life chasing tail.
I was astonished to find myself crying within 13 minutes. Williams tells me exactly the same thing happened to her when she listened to the podcast: “And I’m not a crier. Things don’t get to me. I’m thick-skinned, I’m experienced, I’m savvy. It takes a lot to break through that.” It’s a very straight-down-the-line description, and the opposite of how she looks, which is much younger than 44, wide-eyed, elfin. In so many of her roles, Williams enlivens a kind of protectiveness, which she then undercuts in some way – in Dawson’s Creek it was with party-girl antics; in Brokeback Mountain, her Oscar-nominated turn, her vulnerability is both manipulative and tragic, as she ventriloquises the homophobia of her society; in Dying for Sex, everything is laced with bone-deep wit. “As soon as I had that reaction to the podcast, I thought: ‘Well, I’m sunk. Whatever this thing is, I’ve already emotionally signed on.’”
It is an exquisitely affecting performance, but that’s not what’s radical about the show. First, it’s all the sex, “and we made this pre-All Fours. That book hadn’t come out yet. The world hadn’t been split wide open.” She’s talking about Miranda July’s semi (massively) autobiographical novel, which people call the first great menopause novel when it is actually (in my view) much more about female sexual appetite. In July’s telling, that appetite is immense and terrifying, can and will destroy anything in its path, particularly if what’s in its path is “marriage”. Anyway, Dying for Sex came first, and also kicks off with the protagonist leaving her partner. From there, Molly’s journey is as explosive as an Exocet missile. She discovers her inner dominatrix with a neighbour (played by Rob Delaney) who doesn’t use the rubbish chute correctly, and gets there via a same-sex experiment with submission.
But this is TV that’s also like Grand Theft Auto for cliches, casually shooting down norms and taboos like they’re defenceless passersby. The central female friendship is much more than a bit of sisterly support; Molly effectively swaps her husband for her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate), a charismatic, chaotic actor who already has amazing sex all the time. Jungians call this relationship the golden shadow – the friend who’s similar but excels you in some way you deeply value. The real-life Nikki Boyer worked with them on set, signing off the show’s embellishments – and it’s a gorgeous depiction of “that person [who] knows you in a wordless way, there’s no explaining, you’re not trying to woo, you’re not trying to impress”, but not idealised. Nikki is, as the abandoned husband Steve (Jay Duplass) constantly points out, the last person you want around when you’re having palliative chemotherapy. She can’t even reliably find her purse in her own handbag.
Desire is a “portal” for Molly, says Williams, “and maybe that’s what moved us so much about it, is that she chose to see it as an opportunity – to gather something together and take it and imbibe it, own it, before she was divested of everything. She’s saying, I’m committing to this journey, and the only thing I’m taking with me is you, my best friend. I’m going to pursue my own pleasure in the midst of this illness, which is going to ultimately take my life and cause me a lot of pain. I’m going to continue to seek pleasure in this body, which is capable of both those things.”
Then there’s the menopause, which Molly has chemically induced as part of her treatment plan (and says, plaintively, “I thought the one good thing about dying was that I wouldn’t have to go through the menopause”). It’s still high jeopardy, playing a woman experiencing menopause – like playing a grandmother, actors cross a Rubicon where they no longer get cast in younger roles. Williams shrugs the risk off, as if to indicate that she doesn’t worry about things like that. Much less so now, but omertà around talking about menopause at all was so strong until recently that a woman in her 40s might, as Williams describes, “never have had this conversation. Nobody had ever mentioned to me that this was in my future. Not my mother, not my grandmother, not a doctor.”
The real Molly loved to take pictures of herself in hospital, says Williams. “She liked to buy beautiful lingerie, it made her feel great, and she would take beautiful photos of herself, hide her scars, send these selfies out, and communicate with strangers. When she was no longer able to have bodily encounters, she was still sexting from her hospital bed.”
Another stunningly mould-breaking thing about Dying for Sex is that there’s a huge amount of affection and acceptance and delight between Molly and the people she sleeps with. It’s not because they’re in love – nobody’s trying to turn this into a romcom – it’s simply what’s liable to happen when people desire each other and are open about what they want. On the podcast, after Molly dies, Nikki speaks to some of her lovers and, Williams says, one of them responds: “‘She made me feel so seen, and like I was OK – like the things that I desired, there was no shame or judgment about them.’ I think there’s some connection there, between what illness does to her body, and what desire does to a body. Because bodies have a mind of their own. They do things without us wanting them to. They get sick without us wanting them to. They secrete things without us wanting them to. And desire can also work like that.”
From certain angles, the cancer – as real and inexorable and based-on-true-events as it is – functions as a shortcut to utopia. “Could you live like this if you didn’t have a terminal diagnosis? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” says Williams. At one point, she’s in an Uber with a guy, on their way to have sex, when it all gets too much for him and he prematurely ejaculates. “It isn’t making fun of him, it isn’t ‘How lame, what a disappointment’, it’s thrilling and exhilarating, just to radically accept people as they are.”
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Williams makes the case that, ultimately, Dying for Sex isn’t about dying or sex. If there’s a central theme, it’s sexual abuse. That’s why sexual fulfilment has eluded Molly to that point – she was abused by one of her mother’s boyfriends when she was seven: “She was split off from herself because of the abuse she experienced when she was a child. She still grew up, but a part of herself is frozen in time at that age – she’s in amber. I think that’s what she sets out to do, even though she doesn’t know that’s what she’s doing – the sexual journey is trying to repair the original wound while she still has time.”
When she signed up for Dying for Sex more than three years ago, Williams discovered she was pregnant with her third child, her second with producer Thomas Kail (the father of her oldest daughter is Heath Ledger). “We toyed with the idea of using CG and painting out my stomach, but decided it would just be completely preposterous to do these scenes with a giant belly between me and my co-stars.” They had to wait, but that was fine because she really doesn’t work all that much, she says – this is the first thing she’s done since The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s movie memoir. That looks like great confidence – the conviction to wait for something good, the courage to say no – but she bats that off. “No, it’s just having small children. I want to stay home with them.”
I ask quickly about one of her other great roles: her 2014 Broadway turn as Sally Bowles in Cabaret – the musical about nightclub performers in 1930s Berlin as Nazism is on the rise. It felt as if that role really belonged to her, but “everybody feels like that”, she says. “Judi Dench used to say: ‘Oh, Sally Bowles? My part?’” It’s such a fantastic part, the tough-but-fragile, private-but-public siren, and no two actors ever play it the same way; Williams brought a gaucheness and uncertainty that was truer to Christopher Isherwood’s book than the Liza Minnelli film. It must have been fun to do a production before there was so much actual fascism in the air, right? “I hope that a time comes when it loses its context,” she says, heavily. “I wish Cabaret didn’t feel so modern. I can’t wait for it to feel dusty.”
Mmm, same. But such consolation to the turmoil of the world as ordinary life, sex and death can offer, Dying for Sex has in spades. One of the things that’s rarely said about dying, or the menopause for that matter, is that it might not be characterised by sadness or brain fog but by sexual voraciousness. “This is what the real Molly was facing – how is she going to use her body sexually when it’s failing her in so many ways? But she figures it out. Esther Perel [the psychotherapist] talks about sex as an antidote to death. What could make you feel more alive? I think a lot about that … If you want to continue to explore sexually through menopause, you need to become creative. If you want to explore sexually through illness, you need to become creative.”
Dying for Sex is on Disney+ from 4 April