‘Watch out, I’m even less inhibited’: Olivia Williams on movies, misogyny and living with cancer

Olivia Williams has long balanced her talent with a desire to tell it how it is – and she’s now feeling more frank than ever. The Dune star gets more than a few things off her chest, from the Hollywood patriarchy to AI and living with cancer

Since 2018, Olivia Williams has grown more blunt than she used to be. “I’m a bit less scared of the consequences of saying what I think,” she explains. The actor has never been particularly shy about speaking her mind, as a trawl through any of her old interviews, from the Rushmore days in the late 1990s to her more recent red carpet duties for The Crown, will reveal. But in the last few years, she has become less inhibited, for reasons we will get on to shortly. “Because how bad can it be?” she says, with a droll laugh. “You’re going to die, so it doesn’t matter.”

Williams has positioned herself on the furthest possible edge of an enormous sofa in a posh London hotel. Her parents were both barristers and she is very precise with words. “I’m really, really particular and I’m afraid I will be with you,” she says. This translates to a no-nonsense and crisply funny conversation – she leaves the impression that she does not suffer fools gladly. She hates being misquoted and still remembers, in the early 00s, when a journalist asked her how she felt about Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow taking theatre parts in London. Williams had said she didn’t care. She was in Hollywood at the time, playing American characters in American films. But the story came out differently: “Gwyneth muscling in on our roles.” In her retelling of it today, she calls the journalist a “fuckwit”, before adding, “I shouldn’t say that. I’m not being very guarded.”