Living with Ryan Gosling might be some people’s idea of a dream come true. But for actress Michelle Williams, rooming with the star while filming the 2010 flick Blue Valentine wasn’t all fun and games.
In fact, she called it “horrible.”
“We shot the first part where they’re young and in love and everything is going really well and then we took a two-week break and we lived together,“ Williams, 44, said about the famous film.
Pretty soon after they moved in, things started to change, she said on this week’s episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast.
The legendary movie depicts the evolution of marriage by showcasing how a happy relationship can transform into a strained and unhappy one. The movie ends with Williams’ character ultimately leaving Gosling’s, thanks to the sad and painful dynamic that the actors likely wanted to practice via method acting.
“We did these improvisations during the day to, honestly, find out ways to annoy each other and to destroy this thing that we had made,” admitted Williams.
Despite the production team not wanting a filming break, she and Gosling, 44, were “having such a hard time letting go of the thing we loved.”
So they were given a challenge: destroy their own relationship.
“We learned how to annoy each other. It was horrible,” Williams recalled. “I don’t want to give you reasons to hate me. We were having such a good time. The party has to be over so soon?”
The Manchester by the Sea star said they even went so far as to burn their characters’ wedding photos. They were also told to act out difficult scenarios to trigger the emotional fallout and better create a failing relationship.
“You don’t have to hate me, because now I hate me,” Williams added. “I’m annoying. We [were] calling forth all our worst qualities!”
Williams’ method-acting turned out to be fruitful because she ended up getting an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for her portrayal of Cindy. Goslings’ proved to be successful, too, and the The Notebook hunk said in 2010 that part of their challenge while filming was trying to “dismantle this thing we had been building.”
“[Originally,] we all worked really hard to create this love story portion, when they’re falling in love,” he said at the time. “We wanted it to feel genuine and real and true. And we spent all of this time building it up, and then we had to tear it down.”
He added that while filming, “you’re trying to remember that it is a movie, because it’s so easy to get lost in it.”
