Jessica Williams’ Grounded Game

Jessica Williams is a tried-and-true millennial, and not just because she’ll forever swear by cross-body bags (“I just want to carry a bag that zips”). The actor turned 37 this summer and celebrated with a trip to the quintessential millennial bucket-list city, Tokyo, with her boyfriend. Then, upon arrival, she realized that she’d left her quintessentially millennial SSRI — Lexapro — back home. (Thankfully, she was able to get a quick refill and beat the brain zaps. “It was weird to be in a place where they wanted me to have my antidepressant,” she says with a laugh.)

When she got back from the trip and returned to her day job on the set of the fourth season of Apple TV’s Shrinking, however, she received news that few if any actors of her generation have: She’d clinched her third Emmy nomination in a row, for best supporting actress, for the show. Williams realizes that on this level she’s living the life so many in her cohort can only aspire to, and she’s embracing it accordingly. “We have the dream as millennials to have some sort of monetary gain from the art that we make, something that we love doing,” she says. “So to be able to pay my mortgage, to afford to take care of my dog’s prescription food, and to have health care from my union because of this job that I’m able to do is a dream. It’s like, f*ck, this is awesome.”

While she had acted on a Nickelodeon comedy as a kid, Williams broke out in Hollywood on The Daily Show — aka the millennial evening news — at just 22. From there, she launched the beloved podcast — could there be a more generationally apt medium? — 2 Dope Queens with her friend Phoebe Robinson. She also had a brief stint on Girls (ding-ding-ding!) before starring in the indie film The Incredible Jessica James, followed by a season of the anthology series Love Life (she calls hers “the Black season”). Both of those projects allowed her to do the kind of acting work that she strives to do — the kind of blend of comedy and drama that put colleagues like Jason Segel on the map. (Although she applauds those guys’ craft, she calls Niecy Nash-Betts “one of the greatest ever” at the balancing act.)

“I like to see people being sexy on TV. I want to see more yearning. Everyone’s hot, but nobody’s horny — people aren’t pining. We want Jane Austen.”

Williams credits Love Life with setting her up to land the job to play Shrinking’s Gaby, a role that she radiates good vibrations about as we talk. “The Emmys are really cool because it’s your peers and it’s people that are doing the same job you are,” she says, smiling in a low-key black sweatshirt as we Zoom. “It really means a lot to me. I feel like the supporting category is really cool. It’s where all of the people of color usually are, all the character actors, and all the queer people are. It’s people that I’ve been a fan of for a really, really long time.”

While that character, Dr. Gaby Evans, isn’t the series lead — that designation belongs to Segel’s Jimmy Laird and Harrison Ford’s Paul Rhoades — Williams’ castmate Christa Miller, who plays her friend Liz on the show, describes her fictional bestie as “human funfetti.” In the upcoming fourth season, Williams blessedly gets to do even more than in previous arcs, balancing laughs with deeper emotional scenes as Gaby gets more serious in her relationship with Derrick 2 (Damon Wayans Jr.) and making the decision to open her own trauma center.

Though they’ve been at it since Shrinking premiered in 2023, Williams still thinks of acting alongside Ford as a career highlight, and, she tells me, she sees many parallels between her IRL relationship with Ford and Gaby’s onscreen relationship with Paul. What she doesn’t mention is whether or not she and Ford morning-carpool to work while singing ’90s and early-’00s rock songs as their characters do on the series.

“There’s something really nice about playing this millennial woman who’s a lot in the morning and who really loves on this guy, [while] Harrison Ford’s character seems like he doesn’t want to be in the room and doesn’t care about these people, but secretly he really loves every second of it,” she says. It’s “really nice being able to pour my feelings about Harrison Ford and how amazing it is to be able to act with someone with that insane of a career into playing Gaby with how much she respects and loves him. That really helps my relationship with him — I don’t have to fangirl as much because it’s not like we’re playing two Jedis LOL, we’re playing a mentor-mentee kind of thing. That really lends itself to being a young person starstruck by Harrison Ford.”

In addition to his legendary career, Williams says she also admires that Ford has a rich private and personal life filled with interests outside his job. In addition to dog-momming her little poodle mix, Williams counts sewing among her own hobbies, which she says has helped curb online shopping. It’s also been “liberating” to make clothing for her 6-foot-tall, size-14 body, a pursuit that has also given her a newfound appreciation for her longtime friend and stylist Sarah Slutsky.

“My secret goal is to work with every New Girl guy. Every New Boy. Are they called New Boys?”

Williams recently made news for comments she made on an Apple TV panel about needing white male allies at the top when making a television show as a 6-foot-tall Black woman, praising Shrinking creator Bill Lawrence for being a shining example. She thinks about the dynamic thusly: “We live in a capitalist society, period. It’s the structural makeup. I don’t make the rules. But at the end of the day, when we go to bed at night in August 2026, there’s a racial disparity and a gender disparity about people who get to make the decisions. If that’s the case right now, this year, this day, it is really nice to say, ‘Hey, this is really cool that you can be an ally.’”

Williams commends Lawrence for hiring Black and queer writers in the Shrinking writers’ room, and also for giving her a say in how her character evolves. “When I first got the job, Bill was like, ‘If I’m doing my job right, we start writing these characters, and then there comes a point where we hand this over to you and you are the shepherd of your character.’” Jon Stewart, she says, had a similar approach to running The Daily Show: “There’s a respect there that I haven’t often gotten as a Black woman in this business. Now, as an actor, we’re the ones doing a lot of the press, but we are powerless as to what the final product is. A lot of really amazing performances from people of color and women don’t see the light of day.”

As she wraps up Season 4, Williams is eager for fans to see what’s in store, which she mentions will involve a larger constellation of actors, including more Michael J. Fox, a buzzy addition in Christian Slater, and other big guest stars that she can’t name-check just yet. She also just finished shooting a rom-com (the title is still under wraps) with Jake Johnson. “My secret goal is to work with every New Girl guy,” she says with a laugh, referencing Wayans Jr. as well. “Every New Boy. Are they called New Boys?”

Williams believes that rom-coms are as important as they are entertaining. “I like to see people being sexy on TV. I want to see more yearning,” she says. It’s a response to “the idea that everyone’s hot, but nobody’s horny… people aren’t pining. We want Jane Austen. I want to contribute to that. I want to be in that space. And I want to see different kinds of people [falling in love] too: guys smooching and women smooching each other.” (Johnson, for his part, is 5-foot-10. “I was trying to get Jake to look up short guys with tall women,” Williams says. “I was like, ‘Do you even know who Tom Holland is?’”)

Williams knows how lucky she is to be at the top of her game, especially at this particularly tenuous moment in the entertainment business. One of her secrets to sustaining herself in such a cutthroat world? “My mom used to do Franklin Planners a lot,” Williams says of the productivity system. “She would call it ‘filling the tank’: putting into your life so that you have something to pour out into your work and your art.”

Williams continues: “She raised me with that idea of making sure you find things that are fulfilling outside of work so that when those highs and lows come — those moments where there’s somebody more famous than you and the people on the red carpet are like, ‘Get out of the way, you old hag. What are you doing here? We don’t care about you,’ which happens all the time — you still have something grounded that you can return to, like sewing, that reminds you of who you are.”

And who she is is clear as crystal: “You are this person who was born in 1989,” she says, “and got to see the invention of the internet and the popularization of the internet. You got to have all these memories. You’re not just this person in this business. You’re more than that.” And millennials everywhere exhale.

Top image credit: Ottolinger jacket; Hanro bralette; MM6 Maison Margiela shorts; Mondo Mondo necklace; Ettika earrings and ear cuff; Dinosaur Designs ring.