‘M3GAN 2.0’ star Allison Williams finds ‘irony’ in scream queen label

Allison Williams has established herself as a force in the horror genre, but she recently shared that she struggles to watch scary movies on her own.

The M3GAN 2.0 star appeared on The Sam Sanders Podcast and said that she gets anxious watching horror films. She added that she found “irony” in the title of scream queen, but that she felt “honored” that genre fans like her work.

“I am a capital W, bona fide wimp,” she said. “I can only watch horror movies on planes. That’s the only time I can watch them.”

Williams’ breakout film role was in the psychological horror movie Get Out, the directorial debut from Jordan Peele. She plays Rose Armitage, the white girlfriend of Black photographer Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) who lures him into a sinister trap.

During the podcast, Williams told host Sanders that she credits Peele for ushering her into horror, a genre that she had never considered working in because of her anxiety around watching scary movies. She praised horror fans for their appreciation for “big swings and risks.”

Williams continued, “I feel extremely lucky especially because the fans of horror are awesome, and without Get Out, I would not have had the opportunity to interact with them, I don’t think.”

Despite starring in Get Out, M3GAN, and the latter’s sequel, Williams still finds it hard to watch her own work. She said she has to cover her eyes for some of the M3GAN 2.0 scenes.

“There’s two parts that are a little gory,” she said. “I watched the hair and makeup tests of those things. I watched those prosthetics be developed. Without spoiling anything, I was part of all the sequence meetings for the stunt sequences, every single production meeting having to do with it, and I still on the day [of filming] got lightheaded and couldn’t look at the things in question.”

Williams is getting a bit of a break from bloodshed after M3GAN 2.0. She will be starring in the upcoming adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s Regretting You, which she said is one of the only films “where I did not end up bloody.”

Listen to the entire interview with Allison Williams on The Sam Sanders Podcast below.