Marnie Michaels on “Girls” is one of the great characters of 21st century TV, and thankfully Gen Z has helped to boost the popularity of the vainglorious New Yorker played by Allison Williams even if initially the response to the character was that Williams actually was Marnie.
Williams followed up “Girls” with the extraordinary success of “Get Out” and then the Blumhouse campfest killer-doll movie “M3GAN.” But “Girls” is never far from her no matter what, and while doing press for “M3GAN 2.0” she told “Entertainment Tonight” how excited she is that one particular moment from the show has become even more of a meme of late.
No, not the moment Marnie unironically sings Kanye West’s “Stronger.” It’s a moment with a little more applicability to anyone who tries something bold and falls flat. The moment when Marnie said “Let’s make fun of the girl who took a risk and put herself out there creatively.” It occurred in the Season 3, Episode 4 installment “Dead Inside” when a music video Marnie filmed for a song featuring lyrics like “religion is the smile on the face of a dog” suddenly went viral on YouTube.
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“I’m so proud, honestly,” Williams told ET of how that moment has endured in meme form. To underscore that pride, she pressed her hands against her heart in that moment of the interview. “When I saw it applied to the Max name change — HBO Max — it made me so happy.” The funny thing is, that meme was invoke by Warner Bros. Discovery itself when the company tweeted its own jokes about the Max name change on the Max X account.
This moment also came up a few days earlier at the Tribeca Festival, when Slate asked her about it as well. The line has separately been applied online to the creative risks taken by TikTok-fueled pop artist Addison Rae, to which Williams said, “She’s amazing and no one should ever call her corny.”
“‘Let’s make fun of the girl who took a risk and put herself out there creatively’ is among my favorite Marnie lines. She is defending a totally un-defensible music video.”
