by Natasha Wolff | October 14, 2025 10:07 am
Because of the overwhelming success of Get Out ($259 million worldwide) and M3GAN ($180 million worldwide), actor Allison Williams has become inextricably linked with the horror genre.
“I’m a horror girl,” says Williams, proudly.
She considers herself a skilled producer of horror films—mostly because she’s consciously aware of what horror fans want while also working hard to tell stories that satisfy her own intellectual sensibilities.
“I try to keep up with them and with horror trends, but I’m not good at watching the actual movies,” Williams says. “They don’t mix well with my nervous system.”
Williams says she typically watches horror films on airplanes, when she’s easily distracted and less prone to jumpscares. Her husband, the German actor Alexander Dreymon, narrated the plot of Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, a huge horror hit when it came out in 2022, to Williams. She didn’t sit through the movie.
“He explained the movie to me verbally,” Williams recalls. In Barbarian, a woman checks into an Airbnb only to discover there’s lots of gruesome stuff happening in the basement and beyond. “I just listened, and I had trouble sleeping for two weeks.”
Hopefully, she’ll get to sleep easier these days. This fall, Williams escapes gory ritual killings and murderous artificial intelligence for the romance genre with the release of Regretting You, a tearjerker based on the 2019 bestseller by Colleen Hoover (It Ends With Us). In the movie, Williams plays Morgan, the mom of teenage Clara (19-year-old Mckenna Grace). When Morgan’s husband, Chris, and her sister Jenny die in a car accident, Morgan and Clara need to figure out how to repair their relationship, with help from Morgan’s brother in-law Jonah (Dave Franco).
Williams made Regretting You back-to-back with M3GAN 2.0. Alternating between the two films was a kind of “genre sandwich whiplash” for the 37-year-old actress.
“It was like, ‘Falling in love with someone onscreen? What is that?’” Williams recalls of playing tender and sentimental scenes with Grace and Franco after playing opposite a psychopathic robot doll.
She had little cause for worry, says Franco. “Watching her move so seamlessly between comedy and drama was seriously impressive,” he says. “I was blown away by how effortlessly she could tap into deep emotion when the scene called for it. At the same time, she’s genuinely funny and brought so much levity to the role.”
Regretting You director Josh Boone agrees. Williams, he says, is “hilarious, self deprecating; her attention to detail is head-spinning. She’s a producer through and through as well as a brilliant actor. She really is going to surprise people in this because you’ve never seen her play this role before. She’ll make you laugh and cry in the same scene.”
Williams is on the frontlines of yet another trend, as Hoover is having a major Hollywood moment. It Ends With Us, starring Blake Lively, grossed over $300 million worldwide last year, and two more Hoover adaptations are on the horizon: Universal’s adaptation of Reminders of Him, starring Maika Monroe, is coming in early 2026 and Amazon MGM plans to release Verity with Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson in fall 2026.
“I love when I can’t put a book down, especially when I get into bed,” Williams says of the Hoover novels she’s read. “I don’t want to be having existential worries about the future of our planet or society. I save that for the daytime,” she adds, laughing.
She’s been surprised by the response she’s already gotten to the Regretting You trailer. “I’ve heard from more people in more corners of my life about this than anything else I’ve done,” Williams says. “People saying, ‘This is one of my favorite books,’ or ‘I’m so excited you’re doing this.’”
Even one of her young co-stars from 2014’s Peter Pan Live!, now college-bound, wrote Williams to say, “You are my dream Morgan.” Of course, that means Williams has a lot to live up to. “I have to try to be everyone’s idea of Morgan, and that can’t be possible,” she says.
Williams thinks the film, which harks back to hits like Terms of Endearment and The Notebook, will connect deeply with viewers. “I’ve been watching cuts, and the audiences are super interactive,” she says. “They’re gasping, laughing, crying. There’s lots of tissues. It’s so emotional, and it’s been a minute since we all cried together at the same thing.”
“I’ve cried watching it,” she adds. She showed a cut to her mom and dad, journalists Jane Stoddard and Brian Williams, and they were equally emotional. “My parents both cried, too.”
Playing the mom of a teenager onscreen had its challenges, says Williams. “But it helped that I was playing someone who’s close to my own age. It didn’t feel as weird as I thought it was going to, and it’s strange how natural it looks to me. I was definitely not made to be a parent at that age. I needed to be a disaster for a little bit longer and be someone else’s child before I had one of my own.”
Williams and Dreymon have a son, Arlo, who’ll turn 4 this fall. “We’re into the dinosaur phase,” she says. “He’ll start suddenly quoting a dinosaur podcast. Kids are really spongey when they find something they’re passionate about.”
Did playing Morgan make her nervous about Arlo becoming a teenager? “I’ve been worrying about that since I was pregnant,” Williams cracks.
The three live in Connecticut, not far from Williams’ childhood home. She moved out of New York City right before the COVID-19 pandemic began and never went back. She feels slightly “estranged” from Manhattan and Brooklyn these days. During a recent interview, she was asked about some of her favorite New York restaurants. “It turns out they were all closed,” Williams laughs.
Raising a family in Connecticut “is so wonderful,” she explains. “It’s very familiar. It feels cozy. My friends from growing up and I talk about this, and two of us have ended up in our hometown. We’re waiting for everyone else.”
At the beginning of the summer, Williams launched a podcast with her lifelong BFFs Hope Kremer and Jaymie Oppenheim, who both live in Maine, called Landlines. They discuss topics related to adulthood, relationships and parenting.
“There’s a lot of work involved, and it’s been a fascinating learning curve, but it’s the most fun,” says Williams. “It feels like such a great hack to hang out together. It’s been pretty dreamy.”
Part of the goal of Landlines is to demystify the “supposed-tos.”
“It’s so herculean to raise a kid,” says Williams. “But there are a lot of people who make it look easy. We’re three demographically identical people, but we all have really different insights into the subjects we talk about.”
In a lot of ways, parenthood and the podcast have had Williams reminiscing about perhaps her most iconic role: Marnie on six seasons of HBO’s Girls.
“I miss all the people we made Girls with. It was a singularly incredible experience,” Williams says. “I wish someone had told us when we were making it that none of it was normal.”
The experience of the show airing wasn’t easy. “I loved playing Marnie a lot, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but it was also deeply painful,” she says. “It was so loud culturally, which had its rewards. It was amazing to be part of a project that so many people cared about. But people were so mean about it, too.”
Lately, the series has been experiencing a resurgence thanks to rewatch podcasts and TikTok clips. When it first aired, Williams says, people would remark, “This is my life every day. I don’t want to watch this. I don’t want to run into these girls. I don’t want to work with them.”
Now, the younger generation has a “little bit of distance that’s so much more appreciative and generous,” she says. “I’m loving the way Gen Z is responding. It’s like looking through a yearbook rather than reading the newspaper. I talk about Girls more now than I did five years ago.”
“What an incredible ride it’s been, and to still be on,” she says.
Hair: Xavier Velasquez
Makeup: Samantha Lau using Dior Beauty
Nails: Pattie Yankee
Photo Assistants: Eric Hodgman, Farley Schilling
Styling Assistant: Kyle Gleason
Shot at Corner Studio[1] in Manhattan
Source URL: https://dujour.com/culture/allison-williams-regretting-you/
Copyright ©2025 DuJour unless otherwise noted.