Michelle Williams is honoring “Dawson’s Creek” and her on-screen grandmother.
“The Fabelmans” actress paid tribute to her Capeside past on Monday night at the 32nd annual Gotham Awards in New York City, immediately bringing up Mary Beth Peil, who played Evelyn “Grams” Ryan on the WB series.
“Whenever something good happens for me in my life, I can draw a straight line back to somebody who was meant to be here tonight but, being a New Yorker, means living in a reality that you are definitely not in control of — so she’s not in the room, but she’s in my heart. Mary Beth Peil played my grams on Dawson’s Creek,” Williams began. “I was an emancipated minor when we met. I was 16 years old, and I was totally alone. Mary Beth Peil was the first artist that I had ever met in my life. She didn’t call herself that, but there was something different about her. It was the way she asked questions, the way that she leaned into conversations, and how excited she seemed for every moment of every day on our TV set. And I didn’t know what this ineffable quality was, but I knew I wanted to pull my chair closer to hers.”
Williams explained that she got to know Peil as a performer, a singer and a mother, noting, “she could do anything.”
“She showed me that creativity was more than a mere profession. 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 continued. “She told me stories about this place — New York fucking City — and she said it was somewhere that I could go and I could build a life. She said that I should try doing theater. I started reading plays and talking to her about them, and she urged me on: ‘Yes, yes. That’s wonderful, my girl. You should do that, you should try that.'”
Williams explained that at the time, she “wasn’t an artist or a mother; I wasn’t even a high-school graduate. Honestly I was barely even a Michelle; I had just gotten people to stop calling me Shelly. But now I was Mary Beth’s girl. And that made me a somebody.”
The pair starred on “Dawson’s Creek” for all six seasons from 1998 to 2003, with Williams playing Jen Lindley, a teenager sent to a small town to live with her grandmother. At the Gotham Awards, she brought along best friend and “Dawson’s Creek” co-star Busy Phillips.
Williams closed out her speech by noting that the honor allows her to look back.
“I am grateful for this honor because it allows me to look backwards in time and realize that I couldn’t have played Wendy Carroll [in ‘Wendy and Lucy’] or Randi Chandler [in ‘Manchester by the Sea’] or Marilyn [in ‘My Week with Marilyn’] or Gwen [in ‘Fosse/Verdon’] or Mitzi Fabelman [in ‘The Fabelmans’] without having first played Jen Lindley,” she said. “I wouldn’t have known how to handle being Steven Spielberg’s mother [in ‘The Fabelmans’] without having been Mary Beth’s granddaughter, so thank you Mary Beth, and thank you Gotham Awards for this.”
