‘Counterpart’ Star Olivia Williams Gets Candid About Sex Scenes & Ageism In Hollywood

Olivia Williams doesn’t get a lot to do in the first episode of Counterpart. Her character, Emily Silk, is a by all accounts a loving wife who spends the entire episode languishing in a coma. Sure, we discover that the alternate universe version of her character is alive at the end of Episode One, but it’s not until Episode Three, that Williams’ “Emily Prime” really begins to emerge as a multi-faceted character.
Williams is well aware of how her role looks at first blush. “I said to my agent, ‘What part of this character made them choose me? What in my previous work demonstrated my skill in lying still in hospital bed?’” she said with a hearty laugh. Decider spoke with the actress a few weeks before Counterpart‘s premiere at Winter TCA. While many members of the cast praised creator Justin Marks for delivering them a completed 10-episode season before shooting began, Williams told us that she had to decide to sign on to Counterpart after only reading the first episode.

“Well, they wouldn’t give me any more text and I sort of said, ‘This isn’t my first rodeo. I have been promised things in the past and unless it’s in writing with a guarantee, I know these things don’t happen.’ So they really had to promise beyond promisey-promise that this was going to get better for me,” said Williams. “But the persuader really was the quality of the writing in the first episode and I just thought, even if I don’t wake up from the coma, I think to be involved in something where the writing is this good and I get to hang out with talent like J.K. [Simmons], it can’t be bad to be there by extension.”

Starz‘s Counterpart is a walloping good hybrid of science-fiction and spy thriller. It takes place in modern-day Berlin, but there’s a surprise. During the dying gasps of the Cold War, Soviet scientists in East Berlin discovered a parallel universe to ours. The experiment meant to connect the worlds actually set them spinning off on wildly different paths. That means that in this alternate “Prime” world, everyone has a proverbial counterpart. J.K. Simmons plays a lowly U.N. employee named Howard Silk who discovers that his counterpart is a high-ranking operative on the other side. “Howard Prime” is trying to stop a universe-jumping assassin from taking out targets on our side. His ex-wife, Emily Prime (Williams), is trying to figure out what’s going on.
It’s a complicated text, but it’s made riveting by expert plotting and incandescent character portraits. Though we haven’t yet met the comatose Emily in the show, Emily Prime is a rare female character. She’s tough and vulnerable, sexy and brilliant. She has a lover, a career, and a torn sense of duty. Oh, and she’s written to be middle-aged. Williams told us that she relished playing such a multi-dimensional character. “I didn’t have to push for it. It was there in the text, but these are things as an actor you’re hoping that are going to be thrown [your way]. You’re like a dog sitting under the table going, ‘Throw me a bone! Throw me a scrap! Something I can do something with.’ And this is just like a cornucopia of things you can do something with,” she said.

Williams went on to say that it was all thanks to Justin Marks. “I like it that when he’s writing for women, he’s not writing simplistically, you know? I am a sort of one of those women who say that motherhood changed me and raising my children has been the most fulfilling thing in my life and so to have to get into the mindset of someone for whom that hasn’t been the case, that was hard for me because I don’t want to play her. I don’t like it when I meet people — I don’t warm to them — when people go, ‘God, my kids are a f-cking nightmare.’ But I had to love her and know her and play her and be her.”

Even though it’s been a great year for women on television — with shows like The Handmaid’s Tale and Big Little Lies sweeping awards shows — Hollywood is still a hotbed of misogyny, and more importantly to Williams, ageism. “It actually is all upside down. In any other job, if you’re a doctor or a lawyer, and you had 25 years experience, you would be the more valuable for that experience. I am now in a position to give you the benefit of everything I’ve learned as an actor. And when I get to that place, the parts go down a narrowing way. But if you do throw me a bone, I will turn that bone into the most delicious f-cking meal you’ve seen because I know how to do it. I’ve got the kit! And it’s hard to watch someone, you know, in an industry that celebrates youth and gives the chewiest stuff to the young ones.”
“It’s a narrowing road,” she added. “But not anymore because of people like Justin [Marks] who take the trouble as a sort of relatively young man to actually see the world from a middle-aged woman’s perspective.”
“I get some scripts and I get really excited and then you read it, and you go, ‘What about that is interesting?’ To play the muse of an artist? Can you not see that I want to play the artist? Playing the muse of the artist is of no interest. I’d like to be the artist and I’d like that not-very-good actor with a nice arse to be my muse.” She joked before lamenting, “People think they’re telling a story from a woman’s point of view, but you’re still incidental.”

Counterpart gives Williams the opportunity to play a successful, driven woman who has secrets to keep. She has an important role to play in a cat-and-mouse game of espionage. She gets a tense romantic triangle between a handsome younger lover and her hard-boiled ex. She commands respect and messes up. Because Emily Prime is such a fully-realized character, she also gets a sex life. Williams raucously remembered how she found out exactly how far her director wanted her and co-star Nicholas Pinnock to go in their first scene together in Episode 2.
She said with a laugh, “They threw that pretty full-on sex scene in and the director said, ‘I have a very European sensibility. I don’t want to shoot anything gratuitous, anything you don’t need to see. I was thinking like the opening of Betty Blue.’ Now I don’t know if you’ve seen the film Betty Blue, but in my generation, that was the closest thing to full-on porn you could get your hands on. And I was like, ‘Are you f-cking kidding me? She was like some kind of 22-year-old French sex goddess. And I’m a 49-year-old woman who’s had two kids!’ So I’m like, ‘Alright. Whatever. Betty Blue it is.’ So after that, everything was a walk in the park.”
New episodes of Counterpart premiere every Sunday on Starz. You can binge the first three episodes on the Starz app now.

Stream Counterpart on Starz