Michelle Williams Says Her Time On ‘Dawson’s Creek’ Was Like ‘A Factory Job’: ‘It Was Formulaic’

While ’90s teens have fond memories of “Dawson’s Creek,” the show wasn’t an entirely positive experience for Michelle Williams.

During a recent conversation with Patricia Arquette for Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, the “Venom” star admitted she had at an issue with her time on the teen soap, which soured her taste for working in television.

“Doing ‘Dawson’s Creek’ for six-and-a-half years, while it was an incredible learning experience – we did 22 episodes a year, and you’d be getting scripts at the last minute and you had zero input,” Michelle, who played Capeside bad girl Jen, explained. “It was a little like a factory job.”

“It sounds formulaic,” Patricia said.

“It was formulaic, yes,” Michelle agreed.

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The four-time Oscar nominee said that her distaste for the experience kept her from a regular role on the small screen for more than 15 years, a streak she broke in 2019 with her work on FX miniseries “Fosse/Verdon.”

“I don’t think I’ve done television in between then and now because of a fear of loss of input,” she said. “When this came around, people had been saying for a long time, ‘Television is different now.’ And I could see that that was true and that it was something that I should open myself up to.”

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While Michelle may have felt creatively stifled on “Dawson’s Creek,” The WB drama gave her a lot to be thankful for.

Along with giving her her big break, the show connected her with a wide range of fans, many of whom still feel strongly about it and about Jen to this day.

“I love how attached people feel to it now,” Michelle told Entertainment Weekly for the show’s 20th-anniversary cover shoot in 2018. “The kind of overwhelming response that people still have to it, and how much they identify with it, and how much it was a part of their life when they were growing up. Because that stuff that sort of gets in there during those really formative teen years, it kind of stays there. So I find it really heartwarming and really sweet when people talk about what it meant to them.”

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