I watched the first half of the Fosse/Verdon miniseries when it first aired, and I watched the last half over the weekend. It really is a brilliant series, and it’s one of those rare moments in television where the producers and writers figured out how to structure the dang thing BEFORE they started shooting. The original intention was to do a straight up miniseries about Bob Fosse. But then they realized that to tell Fosse’s story, they needed to tell the story of his relationship with his wife and collaborator and career partner Gwen Verdon. Michelle Williams plays Verdon and she was given equal time, equal pay and equal weight-of-character to Sam Rockwell’s Fosse. And it’s brilliant. Their chemistry, their scenes together and apart, and just the incredible amount of detail in both of those performances. Michelle absolutely kills it at Verdon – I honestly didn’t know Michelle had the range to play that kind of role.

Anyway, Michelle and Sam obviously are coming for all the Emmys. I haven’t seen much Emmy campaigning from Sam, but that doesn’t surprise me – he’s not much of a campaign-season hustler anyway. Michelle is happy to campaign though, which is why she gave a lovely, in-depth interview to Vulture’s Emmy issue. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

Playing Gwen Verdon: “It’s so much to play. She would accentuate a sentence where a normal human being wouldn’t. How is she going to sit on that chair? How is she going to collapse? How is she going to wipe away a tear? She had a sense of who people wanted her to be, and she wanted to deliver. I want to be a tiny little ball as a person, and when I started researching this, I was like, F–k, this is going to be good for me. Her nature is so opposite of mine. And I’m going to have to expand myself as a human being in order to play her.”

She was reticent to work in TV again after Dawson’s Creek: “When I got out of television, it felt like a stain on you. It was hard work to erase it and to ask to be looked at in a different new way…. Scripts come at you and you have no say. You feel like an eternal child,” she says, noting that while grateful for the experience on that show, she didn’t want to return to that feeling. “I was afraid of putting myself in a position where I was going to commit to something and then eventually be asked to do something that I didn’t want to do.”

Being an equal partner on the show, complete with equal pay: “They gave me the support I needed, and for them that took the form of putting their money where their mouth is.” FX paid for the dance lessons she asked for, and opened the dance studios when she needed them, and even agreed to postpone production for a week when she and Rockwell insisted they needed more rehearsal. “People were treating me like I had value, and so then I felt valued, and I displayed my value.”

Learning how to make money by doing something other than indies: Money, she says, means “choice, freedom, peace, quiet, downtime… I used to really believe in work being a pure thing, but I don’t know how practical that is or how worldly that is,” she says. She begins to act out a sort of science-lab experiment with her hands, as if she is currently titrating her own career. “I started to feel like, Can I drop these other colors into the solution without polluting it? Can I retain how I think of myself while adding in these other qualities and concerns, such as a retirement fund?”

If Verdon was around today, would she have gotten credit for her work? “I think so. I thought the world was the world. I didn’t ever expect things to be fair. I didn’t expect this much out of life, being a woman. And in the last couple of years, that started to shift.”

[From Vulture]

That is one of the saddest yet most realistic moments in an interview EVER: “I thought the world was the world. I didn’t ever expect things to be fair. I didn’t expect this much out of life, being a woman.” We don’t really think about it or talk about it that much, because as we grow up, our expectations of fairness and justice and equity are beaten down so far that we’re sometimes surprised when someone actually, you know, treats us fairly. Also: I still friggin’ love that Michelle has started to talk more about money and why she’s made some shifts in her career, and why she’s made more “commercial” movies lately. She’s got a retirement account. She’s saving money for her daughter. I love when women talk about money.

Photos courtesy of FX, WENN.