Allison Williams has entered the chat about privilege and nepotism.
The M3GAN star opened up about growing up in Connecticut as the daughter of news anchor Brian Williams, and journalist Jane Gillan Stoddard, within commuting distance to Manhattan—and the leg up in in life that afforded her.
"There's no conversation about my career without talking about the ways in which I have been fortunate," Allison said in a Dec. 29 interview with Wired in which she described her privilege as "thorough."
"I was definitely concerned with making sure people understood I was a hard worker," she said, "as if somehow that would absolve me of the privilege."
Allison had her breakthrough role in HBO's Girls in 2012, playing Marnie Michaels, the character that everyone loved to hate. And when blogs and the media found out who her father was, the accusations of nepotism emerged.
Allison suggested that she felt pressure to prove she had her acting career on her own merits and that she was truly ready.
"I didn't want anyone to see me growing, learning, changing, shifting," she added of doing interviews after landing her breakout role. "Part of humanity is that evolution… Once I started to wrap my head around that, it took the pressure off having to seem perfect all of the time."
And these days, she's unbothered by those who still say her career is the result of nepotism, noting, "It doesn't feel like a loss to admit it."
"If you trust your own skill," the Get Out star said, "I think it becomes very simple to acknowledge."
As for acknowledging the impact of social media on creating new identities in today's world, she noted, "The metaverse would ask us to be comfortable eschewing the authentic, the physical, the human, the grounded, the stripped away, the bare bones, for a persona of our very deliberate creation." The Yale University graduate continued, "I have found that dance, that conversation between two versions of preferred reality, to be very interesting."