With a total of nine Emmy nominations announced on Tuesday for FX show Dying for Sex, its star Michelle Williams told Deadline the cast and crew group chat was blowing up. “There’s lots of fun activity on the thread. So many threads with so many women involved with this show, and so we’re enjoying ourselves over text.”
Dying for Sex is written by Liz Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock, and loosely based on the real-life story of Molly Kochlan (Williams) who leaves her husband in search of sexual pleasure following a terminal cancer diagnosis. Molly and her best friend Nikki had co-hosted a podcast based on Molly’s blog “Everything Leads to This”. The show also stars Emmy nominees Jenny Slate as Nikki, and Rob Delaney as ‘Neighbor Guy’, with Jay Duplass as Molly’s husband Steve and Sissy Spacek as Molly’s mother Gail.
The legacy of Molly is carried on by the show’s visibility and success, Williams noted. “She lives on, she gets to live a little more and we get to gather in her name once again.” She called the show’s Emmy recognition an opportunity to “make more contact” with Molly, saying “it’s like another download of her energy.”
Playing the role of Molly has left Williams with a certain perspective on her own life, she said. “One of the things that really lingers for me is her radical insistence on, first of all, life on her own terms without fear of judgment and her commitment to pleasure amidst pain, to try and hold enough space for both things. I can take that as a reminder just through my normal days, which have their ups and downs, and can be difficult or joyful, but that they don’t have to just be one thing.”
She continued, “We have been so blessed, so fortunate to be on the receiving end of what the show has meant to people. And I greet that with such appreciation and so much humility. And again, I draw it all right back to Molly and Nikki. We are amplifiers of who they were, so all the credit goes straight back to them. But to receive the reaction of the show have been one of the most profound experiences of my professional life.”
Williams recently wrapped on A Place in Hell, written and directed by Chloe Domont (Fair Play). The film follows two women working at a high profile law firm. Daisy Edgar-Jones and Andrew Scott also star.
“We just finished,” Williams said of the shoot. “I had the absolute time of my life. I adore her [Domont]. She gave me an amazing opportunity to play somebody I’ve never done anything like before, and also to explore genre. I mean, when I saw Fair Play, I was so blown away by her, the mind behind it, by her filmmaking, by her storytelling tension that she was building. And I haven’t made a lot of work like that, so I was really excited. It’s a completely different character for me and a completely different genre for me and that was just an absolute thrill.”