Eight years ago next week, TV history was made. In the season four premiere of HBO’s Girls, Desi (played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who’s now on The Bear) performed anilingus on Marnie (Allison Williams). The scene inspired headlines like “Let’s Talk About the Marnie Butt Munching” and “ICYMI, There Was Ass Motorboating on Girls Last Night” (we were guilty of playing up the shock value, too), but there’s one headline in particular that still stands out to Williams, all these years later.
“I remember that headline very clearly,” Williams told Vulture, referring to a Barstool headline about getting her salad “tossed.” If that scene happened in 2022, “if I was on a show that was that predictably Monday-morning think piece–y, the pressure of that would be really overwhelming in a way that it wasn’t then,” she said. “I didn’t know anything else.” (If anything, the butt-eating scene is an inspiration to current HBO programming.)
In the years since the episode, Williams has weaponized her “good white person” image in Get Out, as well as The Perfection and the murder doll masterpiece M3GAN. “It has just kind of happened,” she told Syfy about her pivot to horror. “But, it has also been a choice from role to role, story to story, theme to theme. I would say that Get Out certainly set me on the path of seeing this genre differently. I am really scared when I watch horror movies, so I didn’t ever really consider this genre to be one that could feel like home to me because I can’t stomach most of the movies that exist under this banner.”
M3GAN opens this Friday.
(Via Vulture)