M3GAN actress Allison Williams is the latest celebrity to weigh in on “nepo-baby” discourse. Since New York Magazine’s entertainment site Vulture declared 2022 “The Year of the Nepo-Baby” and provided a guide to the “nepo-verse,” many successful children of industry professionals have shared their insights. In an interview with Wired, Williams recognized the advantage that accompanied being the daughter of former CBS News anchor Brian Williams and journalist Jane Stoddard Williams.
Williams is best known for starring in the HBO hit series Girls and Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Williams earned a Critics Choice Award for her performance in 2014’s television special Peter Pan Live!. In 2018, she starred in the horror film The Perfection. Up next, audiences will see the actress in Blumhouse’s creepy doll flick M3GAN. Williams portrays Gemma, who is thrust into the role of caregiver for her young niece. Gemma, who is a roboticist, gifts the eight-year-old with a prototype of M3GAN, an AI doll created by her.
“There’s no conversation about my career without talking about the ways in which I have been fortunate.” She later adds: “It doesn’t feel like a loss to admit it. If you trust your own skill, I think it becomes very simple to acknowledge.”
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
The Pressure of Nepotism
Universal Pictures
While Williams acknowledged her privilege, she added that coming from well-connected parents had its disadvantages. Williams said she was “definitely concerned with making sure people understood [she] was a hard worker” and that she felt pressure to “seem perfect all the time.”
The pressure from coming from an industry-established family was also discussed by actress Kate Hudson (the daughter of Goldie Hawn and musician Bill Hudson, and the step-daughter of Kurt Russell). Hudson told the Independent that she felt like she “had to live up to something,” and that she believed there were a couple of times she didn’t land a job as directors didn’t want her parents to “become what the movie was about.”
Jamie Lee Curtis, whose parents are movie stars Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, shared her take through a lengthy instagram post. She wrote: “For the record I have navigated 44 years with the advantages my associated and reflected fame brought me, I don’t pretend there aren’t any, that try to tell me that I have no value on my own.”
She added, “It’s curious how we immediately make assumptions and snide remarks that someone related to someone else who is famous in their field for their art, would somehow have no talent whatsoever. I have come to learn that is simply not true.”
