Dawson's Sneak: Michelle Williams' New Valentine
Thomichelle Kailliams
Michelle Williams (not of Destiny’s Child) is engaged! and pregnant!
People broke the news with some photos of Williams and new her fiance, Thomas Kail, that look awfully staged — and he certainly knows a lot about stages as the director of Hamilton. Ok, that’s out of my system. He also directed Michelle in Fosse/Verdon, which is apparently where they met. Since the news broke, Michelle has been spotted with her ring at JFK airport.
This photo allegedly taken as they were spotted out shopping for baby clothes in London and it was taken by a man called PIP.
There are a few reasons why this news (and its delivery) are particularly sus:
As far as anyone knew, Kail was still married to actress Angela Christian, who he had been with since 2006. However, she did not attend the April premiere of Fosse/Verdon. Their last public appearance together was in December 2018. As of 2017, the Kail was attached to direct a film she was producing, but presumably that’s not happening anymore. Christian is known primarily for theater and most was most recently seen in The Rise of Skywalker.
April 2019 was a big moth for Thomichelle Kailliams! That month, Williams also revealed that her first marriage to musician Phil Elverum was over. Now, my view of this whole thing is certainly colored by the fact that I’m a such a Phil Phan. But also I think regardless of that, Thomichelle Kailliams just don’t look good in the situation. Williams and Elverum’s married in the summer of 2018, two years after he lost his wife to cancer. He uprooted his life in Washington, bringing his daughter to live in New York with Williams.
Pitchfork profiled Elverum ahead of his latest release as Mount Eerie, Lost Wisdom pt. 2.
To hear him tell it, his nine months in New York felt fleeting and unreal. “It wasn’t quite long enough to find myself there,” he says over the phone from Washington. “I was definitely out of my comfort zone. I self-identify as Mr. Pacific Northwest, and I knew that the city would be a big step away from that bubble.” What made him uncomfortable about New York City? “Oh, I don’t know, everything,” he laughs.
The lyrics of the project provide some insight into the relationship, occasionally directly, “The day the tabloids told the world you separated me/My phone began dinging more than usual.” But I think it’s important to point out he doesn’t speak negatively of Michelle; he’s more focused on how surreal the experience all was. To quote a phave Phil song, “I thought I felt your shape, but I was wrong. Really all I felt was falsely strong. I held on tight and closed my eyes; I had no sense of your size. It was dumb to hold so tight.”
The timeline is quite fuzzy! Fosse/Verdon began filming in November of 2018, and by the end of it, two marriages were over. FWIW it’s nice that Michelle Williams apparently had a nice, supportive working environment on Fosse/Verdon based on her Emmys speech. But also loooord, what a weird story to have a backdrop of your marriage.
Clearly, Michelle’s publicist orchestrated the People exclusive and credited everything to a “source” and some “candid” photos. The story came out on a holiday weekend, ensuring that it would be buried by the festivities. This is also clearly getting ahead of any stories that would come from the Golden Globes this coming Sunday. Michelle is nominated for Fosse/Verdon. So far, she’s been photographed in coats and jackets, but if she’s visibly pregnant, they would have presumably wanted to get ahead of the news. I assume she’s fairly far along if they’re making the information public.
Michelle Williams has generally not been very press friendly when it comes to her relationships. (In addition to Heath Ledger, she has dated CONOR OBERST, Spike Jonze, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Jason Segal.) Which is fine and good. There’s no reason she should be forced to make that information public. She and Heath had a well-documented history of flipping off the cameras. So the People story seems pretty out of character. I don’t blame her at all for wanting to get out of the whole poor Widow Ledger narrative — grief, parenting and celebrity are all exhausting on their own without wrapping them all up into one. But it has seemed that with relationships since then, she has primarily only spoken about them to explain why they fell apart.
That has changed recently. Either because she feels ready to engage with the press or because the relationships had the amount of gravity she felt important to acknowledge. Her relationship with Phil was totally under the radar before she revealed they had married in a Vanity Fair profile. She gave very cute quotes about love and stuff, and it felt too perfect, apparently because it was.
“I never gave up on love,” she later tells me, saying that she has spent the 10 years since Ledger’s death looking for the kind of “radical acceptance” she felt from him. “I always say to Matilda, ‘Your dad loved me before anybody thought I was talented, or pretty, or had nice clothes.’ ” I can hear her voice crack. She sometimes can’t believe that she’s found this kind of love, at last. “Obviously I’ve never once in my life talked about a relationship,” she says, “but Phil isn’t anyone else. And that’s worth something. Ultimately the way he loves me is the way I want to live my life on the whole. I work to be free inside of the moment. I parent to let Matilda feel free to be herself, and I am finally loved by someone who makes me feel free.
While her marriage to Phil’s press rollout was orchestrated masterfully, this is clearly rushed. I would like to think that she entered into the marriage with Phil in good faith and that they gave it an honest try and it just didn’t work out. I would really like to think that.
It’s worth noting that Michelle was allegedly engaged to a businessman who I won’t bother naming here until sometime in early 2018. In July of 2018, she married Phil. The People story announcing her new pregnancy/engagement is such a neat, clipped, basic celeb news item. One of the biggest giveaways that they participated is that the article makes no mention of their previous (current???) marriages. “Williams’ daughter Matilda, 14, played matchmaker, the source says.” Honestly r u kidding me WHAT DOES THAT MEAN. Did Matilda produce Fosse/Verdon and hire Thomas on the condition that he become her new step daddy? Were they really spotted buying baby clothes? What are the Venom movies about? I have a lot of questions.
There’s a quote in an old GQ interview when she was promoting My Week With Marilyn that comes to mind. She’s not speaking specifically about romantic relationships, which I think is important to point out. It comes out of a conversation about emancipating herself to purse her acting career as a teenager. But I do think it speaks to her apparent impulsivity in matters of the heart:
I don't think things through very often—I don't project into the future about how a situation will turn out. Even the simplest things, I'm guilty of making really bad decisions a lot of the time. In my work it's a capacity that's served me well, but in my life it can be a problem.
This is just how she does it. She began dating Heath while working on Brokeback Mountain and was pregnant and engaged shortly after. Hopefully that’s where the similarities to her new relationship end.
I do hope that Thomichelle Kailliams are truly in love. Career wise, it’s a good move for both of them. He’s obviously getting more into film and she will almost certainly do more theater. I did see Michelle on stage once in Cabaret, possibly my favorite musical, and I can’t say she was ideally cast as Sally Bowles. But I do like her quite a bit! Dick is a goddamn cinematic treasure.
Thomas seems corny to me, but I’m not a huge fan of Hamilton/his bestie Lin Manuel-Miranda…so I think that has a lot to do with it. I probably told you about the time I stood on the bathroom line with Cara Delevigne during the Hamilton intermission. And then I (stupidly) ended up Irish goodbye’ing my friends at the Hamilton after party where Icona Pop was playing and there were aerialists and Allison Williams was allegedly in the vicinity. I guess I’m just bragging about not hanging out with Allison Williams of Peter Pan fame even though I could have, which says unspeakably dark things about my soul.
K, gonna go not hang out with Allison Williams now.
xoxo trishelle