Interview with Michelle Williams | Glinda From Oz the Great and Powerful | #DisneyOzEvent #Glinda

Interview with Michelle Williams | Glinda From Oz the Great and Powerful

Our last day in Oz was packed full of star studded interviews. As Michelle Williams walked into the room I could hear the aww from the fellow mommies around me. She has such grace and carries herself in a confident but yet peaceful manner. As the interview began I soon realized that not only is Michelle Williams a wonderful actress, but she is an out of this world mom. As you will read below, her life revolves around her daughter and making more time for her family. By the end of the interview there was a consensus in the room… every single one of us wanted to spend more time chatting with Michelle over coffee.

photo credit insideoutmotherhood.com

 
Q    :    Are you prepared to have legions of little girls flocking around you?
 
MICHELLE  :   In all truthfulness it was maybe the most exciting thing for me was, was to realize… because we made it on a sound stage and you’re sort of locked down, you know, and nobody really comes in and out, but there are these little girls, this little extra, the Quadling children, and I would walk by them in full costume you would just hear, awww, ohhh, and they were really shy, waving,  that way I was like, wow. I hadn’t entertained this possibility at all, that I would delight young children.
 
I was thinking about delighting one young child, and I didn’t realize there would be more than one.  And that’s, I mean, really like, what feels better in this whole world than making a kid smile?  So, that’s fine with me.
 
Q    :    How do you balance your career with motherhood?
 

MICHELLE  :    I was afraid you might ask something like that.  I mean, how do you, how does anybody do it?  It’s like an Olympian undertaking.  Okay, what have I figured out?  What have I really learned?  They’re all such hard lessons, too, I find.  Like, when you really arrive at something that’s like true and honest, it’s taken you so long to get there, and you had to work so hard for it.
 
Because it’s just not what you think it’s gonna be, and nobody really prepares you for it, and nobody really tells you the truth, which is that it’s not possible.  It’s not possible to do both things well at the same time, especially not if you are exacting, and maybe a Virgo, and like, really critical, and ask a lot of yourself.  But I think every mother that I know asks a lot of themselves.  So what I’m trying to wrap my head around is that it’s… get comfortable with the moments, to get comfortable with the fact that it’s going feel like a scale and there’s never gonna be- I’m never gonna arrive at a perfect balance, and it’s always gonna be a give and take.
 
Something’s always gonna feel like it’s suffering, like it’s underserved.  And that’s really hard on your heart to feel like you’re not being the best parent that you could be, or you’re not being the best at your job that you could be. That’s what I’m really trying to get peaceful with… the fact that I’m always going to feel like that and that is the equation for as long as I choose to or have to stay in this position where I work and where I parent. It’s so hard. 
 
It’s really overwhelming.  I mean, I’d be more apt to ask you guys, like, what have you figure it out?  What works for you?  What doesn’t, what are the tricks, what are the hints?  What do you give up?  I’ve definitely given up on… I would rather- it’s a lot of work to clean a house, and I would rather, I think, you know, something small like this. This is a big epiphany for me recently.  I was like, I am not gonna wash my dishes before I put them in the dishwasher.  I find it so hard to make some time for myself.  I am not gonna spend fifteen minutes pre-washing.  Why would I do that?  I’m looking for time everywhere, in every corner, every day, and here I am, pre-washing my dishes.  Not any more.  Silverware, going in there.  Knives, going in there. 
 
I try and buy back time where I can- try and figure out how to buy time.  Somebody, a friend of mine said something to me once that really stuck with me.  He said, everybody thinks that you should spend your time making money, but I think you should spend your money making time.  I’m like, yeah.
 
Q    :    You were an amazing Glinda.  What was your inspiration?
 
MICHELLE  :   Thank you.  I thought a lot about her and I’ve watched that movie passively for years, and watched it with my daughter. I thought a lot about her, but Sam (Raimi) said something really interesting to me in the beginning.  He said there’s a reason that Glinda the Good Witch doesn’t go down the Yellow Brick Road, and that she’s not on the journey. It’s because she’s one dimensional.  She doesn’t have anything she needs to learn about herself. 
 

Thus she’s like the least relatable character.  And I thought, right, that’s a good point.  We don’t wanna do that, you know.  We want people to feel like they’re on a journey with Glinda, too, and that she isn’t this sort of crystalized version who knew it all along and we want her to have struggle, we want her to be human.  But what does she have to struggle with because she doesn’t have a split nature, you know.  She’s not, like, struggling with her- what is she allowed, how can she still be good, and innocent, and believe the best in people, but still have a struggle?
 
And obviously, she’s struggling for the freedom of these people, and she’s struggling, you know, a little bit with her own self doubt.  I thought a lot about transformation.  She’s not somebody who’s had a perfectly easy ride.  She lost her father.  She’s in charge of these sort of refugees, but she doesn’t really know how to protect them and how to make them see.

 
I can’t say that those aren’t things that I’ve weighed in my own life.  And so I thought a lot about transformation and how Glinda transforms these dark and dire situations, how she uses kind of bubbles- I thought about her as somebody who, who transforms tears into bubbles, that she makes the best out of a rotten situation because of a way that she chooses to look at it.  That takes a lot of energy and it’s not entirely human.
 
It is a super-human quality, although I have seen it on, like, Sam, our director.  By the way, one wife, five kids.  One wife and five kids.  It’s like, amazing.  It’s amazing.  He’s such a cool guy.  But he had that attitude, you know.  It’s like a really tough job to make a movie that’s this big.  Can you imagine, all those personalities, like a hundred and fifty people, all their personalities, all their jobs, all their questions, and Sam is the funnel for all of it.  And he maintained this exuberant and this buoyancy, and this belief in the possibility, and he was interested in what everybody had to say.
 
So in some ways I was inspired- I think a lot about my daughter, about- I just think a lot about my daughter, but I also thought a lot about Sam as kind of Glinda the Good Witch.  And I thought about Joan of Ark and, you know, heroes.  

******

At this point we took a group photo with Michelle and she continued a little bit more about motherhood…

MICHELLE  :    No, well, you guys, thank you.  I mean, really, I feel like your blogs are like definitely a place to turn to, a place I get a lot of advice.   I never really posted anything on a blog because I don’t really know how to, but I think every mother has the same question that we were all asking.  Like, how do you do it?  How do you be a mom, and be a parent, and maybe even try and be in a relationship, and the end, also be, be a self.  It’s not mom, or a worker, or a, like, or a something- how do you make all of that work and have- providing this kind of conversation about it, and like this kind of access to it is awesome.  So thank you guys for doing it. 

Thank you so much Michelle for a fabulous interview!

If you haven’t had a chance, check out the rest of the cast interviews!

Michelle Williams | Glina the Good

Sam Raimi | Director

Mila Kunis | Theadora

James Franco | The Wizard

Rachel Weisz | Evanora

Joey King | China Girl

Zach Braff | Finley

OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL

#DisneyOz

Disclosure: I attended this press trip as a Guest of Disney. All opinions are 100% my own.