“Can I tell you something? The things that people make with dominoes are extraordinary,” says Allison Williams. The Girls and Get Out star spent the
“Can I tell you something? The things that people make with dominoes are extraordinary,” says Allison Williams. The Girls and Get Out star spent the morning with her three-and-a-half-year-old son, Arlo, watching videos of precisely that, per his request. “He woke up and really wanted to watch videos of dominoes falling,” she says. “I was gonna be gone doing work in the city, and he wanted to show me some dominoes falling.”
Williams only had a few minutes to spare for dominoes because she’s been busy promoting M3GAN 2.0, this summer’s follow-up to the campy horror flick M3GAN. Williams plays Gemma, a brilliant yet tightly wound toy-making engineer who creates for her recently orphaned niece, Cady (Violet Mcgraw), a robot doll named M3GAN—that’s Model 3 Generative Android—with killer dance moves and a killer instinct. The first film was an unexpected smash for Blumhouse, raking in $180 million on a $12 million budget and inspiring a host of memes and Halloween costumes.
In M3GAN 2.0, Gemma is still looking after Cady. (Be warned: spoilers ahead.) She’s also testifying before Congress about the dangers of AI. But when a greater robotic threat begins to terrorize the Bay Area, Williams is forced to reconsider her hard-line stance—and team up with her murderous robot spawn. “We really did want to be part of that conversation: What are the ethics of this?” says Williams, who also serves as a producer on the sequel. “How should we treat the AI that we interact with? What does it mean to have a relationship with an algorithm, and what does it mean to bring an algorithm into the world? What are your responsibilities?”
While M3GAN 2.0 is bigger, bolder, and a tad loftier than its predecessor, it’s still a sci-fi horror comedy about a venomous little bitch of a talking doll. “We realized really early that the only way to make these movies right was to completely commit to the bit, understand the assignment, and just earnestly do it,” says Williams. “Real tears, real feelings, really do it. Try to put out of your mind the fact that your scene partner is an animatronic doll that is talking to you and singing a Kate Bush song at you.”
Although the film hits theaters tomorrow, Williams has already begun expanding the M3GAN cinematic universe. She’s serving as an executive producer on SOULM8TE, an erotic sci-fi thriller spin-off about a man who buys an android to cope with the death of his wife, which is set to hit theaters in January 2026. As for a M3GAN threequel (the name alone practically demands it), nothing has been greenlit just yet. But Williams has a few ideas.
“We’ve already started talking about what a third movie would look like,” she says. “M3GAN is just fabulous anywhere you put her. It’s sort of like Barbie. If you put her at the beach or in space or in a classroom or wherever, I want to see all of those movies. So I’m like, All right, let’s go make them. Let’s just keep doing it.”
COMMENTS