Michelle Williams Shouted Out Her Grams From Dawson’s Creek

Photo: Variety/YouTube

Everything’s coming up Capeside. Michelle Williams was honored with a performer tribute at the 2022 Gotham Awards on Monday, and she used her acceptance speech as an opportunity to thank her Dawson’s Creek Grams, Mary Beth Peil, for influencing her acting career. Williams said she was a 16-year-old emancipated minor when she met Peil on set of the show. “She was brimming and bursting with energy, and she showed me that creativity was more than a mere profession,” Williams recalled of her former co-star. “And all of this vitality was miraculously turned in my direction. Her smiling face was looking at me, and she called me her girl.” Williams didn’t consider herself an artist, but with Peil’s constant encouragement, she began reading plays and trying theater and dreaming of a life in New York City. Being Peil’s girl, she said, made her “a somebody.”

Williams, of course, went on to become a four-time Oscar nominee for her roles in Brokeback Mountain, Manchester by the Sea, Blue Valentine, and My Week with Marilyn. Most recently, she starred in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. But she said none of her characters would have been possible without her role as Jen Lindley on Dawson’s Creek. “I wouldn’t have known how to handle being Steven Spielberg’s mother without having been Mary Beth’s granddaughter,” she concluded. Now there’s an elegant way to slip a TV role into a film-awards ceremony.