Allison Williams Recalls Being Disrespected on the Set of ‘Boardwalk Empire’: ‘You’re the On-Set Eye Candy?’

At last weekend’s “Women Behind the Words” panel at the Nantucket Film Festival, panelists Allison Williams, Nicole Holofcener, and Michaela Watkins opened up about the dismissiveness and disrespect that they’ve experienced as women in film and TV. Williams talked about how viewers, social media users, and even journalists conflated the “Girls” actresses with their characters. And Holofcener talked about how a prominent industry figure told her to stop writing.

But the most striking remark unfolded when Williams talked about an incident of on-set disrespect she experienced in the years leading up to her breakout success on “Girls.”

“There’s like 10 stories fighting their way from my brain to my mouth that I’m trying to keep out of my mouth,” Williams said. “I guess one of them, just very quickly … people just underestimate your humanity often as a young woman up and coming in our business. I was a stand-in for the pilot of ‘Boardwalk Empire,’ which was the coolest experience ever, an amazing pilot. It was shot on film. It was incredible. But I was at craft services and a member of the crew came up and said, ‘So what do you do here? You’re the on-set eye candy?'”

“That’s an example of, I’m at work and that’s what someone says to me,” Williams continued. “Or an actor I later worked with who watched me eat a pastry and said, ‘Don’t you want to be successful?’ You know, those kinds of comments come up inevitably. Yeah. Look how un-shocked you both are [referring to Eisenberg and Watkins]. That familiar, fuzzy feeling. We’ve all heard it. But for everything like that, there’s like Lena [Dunham] who just so gently, and at basically my same age, would usher me through this very unusual experience and was such an unbelievably talented writer and director, and was able to just get me to breathe and slow down and not do anything, and in doing that, just trust the material and trust that the talent is there.”

Moderator Ophira Eisenberg responded, “I mean, I do think there’s sometimes this misconception that people respond very well to an intense set where someone is kind of badgering them and that makes them.”

“It’s a very specific kind of person who thinks that that,” Williams said. “We can all picture that person.”

“The same image,” Eisenberg said.