Allison Williams Was Once Called “On-Set Eye Candy” While Working on ‘Boardwalk Empire’

Hollywood has a long and ugly history of a lack of female representation and misogyny on sets. While we’ve heard plenty of horror stories from actors, they just seem to keep coming — and Allison Williams is the latest to tell her tale.

Williams had the opportunity to speak to her own experiences with gender discrimination in the entertainment industry alongside Nicole Holofcener and Michaela Watkins during the “Women Behind the Words” panel at the Nantucket Film Festival on June 24.

According to IndieWire, each of the three actresses shared moments of sexism they’ve faced in the past, including Williams and her Girls co-stars being interpreted as their characters in real life, as well as Holofcener being told she should stop writing by a prominent figure in the entertainment industry.

Prior to playing Marnie Michaels on the 2012 HBO comedy, Williams experienced a moment of being disrespected on set of the Boardwalk Empire pilot, which aired on HBO in 2010. Williams was a stand-in on the show.

“People just underestimate your humanity often as a young woman up and coming in our business,” Williams said.

What she described as “the coolest experience ever” and “an amazing pilot” had an unfortunately uncomfortable moment for her. “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?'” she recalled.

She continued, “That’s an example of, I’m at work and that’s what someone says to me.” She also brought up another derogatory instance, when another actor saw her eating a pastry and asked her, “‘Don’t you want to be successful?'”

While sharing this story, she noticed Eisenberg and Watkins’ “unshocked” reactions, pointing out that they both knew “that familiar, fuzzy feeling” and that “[they’ve] all heard it.”

Williams commended Girls writer Lena Dunham for helping her navigate the industry, explaining, “[She] 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.”

Another topic the panel discussed was women-focused storytelling, which Holofcener believes had a major turning point with the comedy Bridesmaids, per IndieWire.

“I remember sitting in the audience at [SXSW] and watching [Bridesmaids] with an audience and thinking, ‘This is going to be huge,’” she shared. “And after that movie, the question of, ‘Can women be as funny as men?’ — which I got a lot — that question was eviscerated and nobody ever asked it again. And I don’t know why it was ever asked in the first place. It’s so stupid.”

Williams starred in M3GAN last year, while Holofcener recently directed A24’s You Hurt My Feelings, which Watkins starred in.