When Michelle Williams won her Emmy for Fosse/Verdon last September, the actor used her time onstage to deliver an inspiring speech about pay equality—a subject with which she had personal experience after a much-publicized pay discrepancy between herself and her male All the Money in the World costar Mark Wahlberg. And on Sunday night at the Golden Globes, after winning another trophy for her portrayal of the late Gwen Verdon—an empowering tribute in itself to gender politics and inequality—Williams used her time onstage to similarly powerful effect.
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Describing the Golden Globe as recognition of the choices she made as an actress, Williams told the audience, “I’m also grateful to have lived at a moment in our society where choice exists. Because as women and as girls things can happen to our bodies that are not our choice. I’ve tried my very best to live a life of my own making and not just a series of events that happened to me but one that I could stand back and look at and recognize my handwriting all over—messy and scrawling, sometimes careful and precise, but one that I had carved with my own hand.”
“And I wouldn’t have been able to do this without employing a woman’s right to choose,” she continued, as audience members inside the Beverly Hilton ballroom grew emotional. “To choose when to have my children and with whom, when I felt supported and able to balance our lives knowing, as all mothers know, that the scales must and will tip toward our children.”
“I know my choices might look different than yours but thank god or whomever you pray to, that we live in a country founded on the principle that I am free to live by my faith and you are free to live by yours.”
Directly addressing women 18 and over, Williams urged, “When it is time to vote, please do so in your own self-interest. It’s what men have been doing for years, which is why the world looks so much like them. But don’t forget, we are the largest voting body in this country. Let’s make it look more like us.”
The Golden Globes marked Williams’s first public appearance since People reported that Williams is pregnant and engaged to Fosse/Verdon collaborator and Tony-winning Hamilton director Thomas Kail.
Speaking to Vanity Fair two years ago, Williams described what it felt like to learn that she was being paid significantly less than Wahlberg—a glaring pay discrepancy she read about in the paper.
“You feel totally de-valued,” she said. “But that also chimes in with pretty much every other experience you’ve had in your workplace, so you just learn to swallow it. [...] A private humiliation became a public turning point.”
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