Allison Williams has a knack for picking box-office successes. In 2017, the Girls actress made her feature film debut in Get Out — Jordan Peele’s monstrously popular horror film. It grossed over $255 million at the box office, despite being made for just $4.5 million. In January 2023, Williams starred in M3GAN, which amassed $181.8 million after costing just $12 million to make.

“Part of that is just listening to what people are talking about,” Williams tells Luxury London. “With Get Out and M3GAN, there were these quiet conversations on third rail taboo subjects that people were having trouble talking about. Get Out was about people thinking we were in a post-racist world, while with M3GAN, a lot of my friends with kids were terrified about technology.”

Regretting You can now be added to Williams’ list of Hollywood triumphs, with the adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s novel nearly tripling its budget of $30 million. In the romantic-drama, Williams plays Morgan Davidson, who discovers that her sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) was having an affair with her husband Chris (Scott Eastwood) after they both die in a car crash. Over the course of the film, Morgan slowly grows closer to Jenny’s boyfriend Jonah (Dave Franco), while her daughter Clara (McKenna Grace) starts her own relationship with local bad boy Miller (Mason Thames).

“This felt like a sleepover movie to me,” says Williams when asked what attracted her to Regretting You. “When I used to go to the video rental store, I’d see a tonne of movies on the shelves in this genre. The movie business supported them, because people went and saw them, and for some reason they’re gone. I missed the experience of sitting in a theatre and watching this kind of movie. I think people really wanted to feel catharsis in a theatre and have an ugly, communal cry.”

Unsurprisingly, Williams is delighted that Regretting You managed to find its audience. She notes that studios always “pay attention to market demand,” and there’s no bigger mandate for a genre than people buying a ticket. “I don’t think people understand that their ticket purchase is like voting for what they want to see in a theatre next year. If you buy a ticket to Regretting You, in a year or two you might get to see another movie that’s like it.”

Williams saw the appeal of Regretting You from her very first conversation with filmmaker Josh Boone. The director of The Fault in Our Stars and The New Mutants had been searching for a project to collaborate with Williams on since the pair met at the start of their careers. After reading the script and then Hoover’s book, Williams became increasingly attracted to the part of Morgan, a character Williams felt was seldom seen on screen.

“This is someone who is deeply unhappy, but not aware of how unhappy she is. She’s going through the motions of motherhood and wifehood. It’s a quieter version of it than I’ve ever seen before. It just felt like it was a type of person I hadn’t seen yet; it was certainly someone I hadn’t played but it felt so real and relatable to a lot of people I know. There’s so much bubbling under the surface that she’s ignoring. I was eager to see what it was like to play her.”

Even though Regretting You couldn’t be more different than the animated movies, sequels, and superhero adventures that regularly populate multiplexes, it did have one, not-so secret weapon that undoubtedly helped put bums on seats. Over the last few years, Hoover has become one of the most popular romantic novelists on the planet, selling more than 30 million books worldwide. The 2024 adaptation of It Ends With Us grossed over $351 million – and became headline news when co-stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni traded lawsuits and accusations of harassment – while movie versions of Reminders of Him and Verity are due out next year.

As an English major from Yale University, Williams is perfectly placed to break down why Hoover’s books have made such a huge impact on both the literary and movie worlds. She credits Hoover’s “uncanny way of observing human behaviour,” which she exaggerates by just two degrees to make them that much more compelling. “Thus it gets to be like realism with just a shot of escapism. I think fundamentally that’s her superpower.”

Hoover manages to deliver authentic characters mixed up in dramatic situations in an endlessly readable manner. “It’s an effortless process to read one of her books. There are other authors who could take a page out of her book.” Considering how much Hoover puts her characters through in Regretting You, Williams says one of the keys to the success of the film was making sure it wasn’t weighed down in sadness.

“That was Josh Boone’s whole thing. He didn’t want any melodrama. The characters are trying not to cry or show their emotions. The emotion is squeezed out of people, despite their best efforts, rather than showing them wailing and mourning. It would have been too self-indulgent and unwatchable to just see that.”

Looking to the future, Williams is only interested in roles that genuinely resonate. Luckily for her, as she gets older and “lives more life”, her fascination is increasingly piqued by a wider variety of characters and perspectives. “That math is changing. Ultimately it’s a gut decision. I always try to make something that I think is going to be what people are going to want to see and support at the box office. I haven’t been right 100 per cent of the time – but I’ve been right a few times.”

Regretting You is available to stream on Prime Video and Apple TV+ now.

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