Michelle Williams Flips The Billing For Fosse's Partner

Thanks to Michelle Williams, now we all know Gwen Verdon was a star.

- Jackson McHenry

“I DON’T KNOW if I’ve ever been a meme before,” Michelle Williams says, laughing, when I mention the viral clip of her, as the great Broadway dancer Gwen Verdon, dramatically wiping a tear off her face in the second episode of FX’s Fosse/ Verdon. Her hand travels up her cheekbone, under her nose, back behind her head, and then back alongside her cheek, flicking behind her like a windshield wiper in the final beat as if to rid herself of Sam Rockwell’s Bob Fosse, the legendary choreographer and director, Verdon’s sometime husband and longer time collaborator, who is trying to smooth over the fact that he has seduced Verdon while his wife is deathly ill. It’s a ridiculously outsize gesture that’s nevertheless fitting for a character whose whole life is theater.

But Williams hasn’t seen her own meme. She doesn’t watch any of her own work, though she agrees to let me show her a clip of someone mimicking it in tribute, provided I cover the part of the screen with her performance. She doesn’t quite remember why she moved her hand the way she did, other than that she and the director, Tommy Kail, had been talking about the way Verdon would prepare to play herself in public and in private. “She had a sense of who people wanted her to be, and she wanted to deliver,” Williams says. And Williams delivered Verdon: She’s up for an Emmy for the role.