Michelle Williams Talks About Setting Boundaries, Avoiding ‘Emotional Wreck-Diving'

With her effortless beauty, Michelle Williams stuns on the January cover of Elle magazine. Inside, she opens up about living her best life and her Oscar-worthy role in “Manchester by the Sea."

Posing in a cozy black Michael Kors sweater adorned with the word LOVE, the actress accessorized her blonde hair with a simple, yet bold red lip for the shoot that accompanies her interview, in which she discusses living her life without fanfare.

“If you feel like people are watching you, it's impossible to have an authentic experience of being alive,” Williams says. “There's a performative aspect and a guardedness, and that's just death. I don't know how to live like that, and I don't know how to give a life to my child like that.”

In addition to living her authentic self, the naturally open 36-year-old has learned to set boundaries for herself and what she reveals to others. “It's not naturally my inclination to be a boundary draw-er,” she says. "I'm like, 'Open up all the doors and the windows and let everybody in.' That's the aim of my work, too. It's been a really, really long time since I've been in an interview. But I have better boundaries now. I feel less susceptible to emotional wreck-diving to come up with explanations for everything.”

Her new movie “Manchester by the Sea” has been gaining Oscar buzz lately. She reveals her inspiration for taking the role of Randi, saying, “Everybody talks about the silences in movies and how interesting they are but it's a lot easier than connecting beat to beat, line to line, inside of a scene in real time in front of a thousand people. But when I went to make ['Manchester by the Sea'], I felt a little bit more freedom, more access inside of myself.”