In Reunited, Awards Insider hosts a conversation between two Emmy contenders who have collaborated on a previous project. Today, we speak with Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who stars in The Bear, and Allison Williams, who stars in Fellow Travelers. They previously worked together on Girls.
It’s as if almost no time has passed when onetime toxic Girls couple Allison Williams and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, wearing accidentally complementary black-and-white outfits, arrive for a reunion at Condé Nast Studios. In a nod to their characters’ musical past and wedding from hell, the set comes complete with a ukulele and a flower crown; in true Desi fashion, Moss-Bachrach makes a beeline for the instrument, strumming chords to himself before the cameras begin to roll. (Sadly, though, Williams never puts on the flower crown.)
Music, of course, was the tie that bound Marnie and Desi, whose disastrous relationship unraveled over the course of multiple seasons on Lena Dunham’s seminal HBO comedy.
But as terrible as the characters came across on the series, the two actors say that many of Marnie and Desi’s songs were actually discarded tracks meant for Kelly Clarkson, with some having been written by Jack Antonoff, who was dating Dunham at the time. Given Antonoff’s recent success collaborating with Taylor Swift, it’s fun to imagine that there’s an alternate universe in which Marnie and Desi hit it big and are on their own Eras Tour.
In Williams’s imagination, though, post-Girls Marnie is still a struggling musician. By now, she thinks, Marnie has already gone through a second divorce; she’s “probably on the verge of deciding to have a baby on her own,” says Williams. Even more shockingly, she thinks her character has ditched New York for the burbs of Boston. Moss-Bachrach, meanwhile, sees Desi across the coast, working with “at risk” teens or bussing tables at a place like Pappy + Harriet’s, out in Joshua Tree.
Even seven years later, it’s hard not to see Marnie and Desi when these two interact—for better or for worse. “[People] fully assumed that the girls on Girls were just in a documentary series and the men were doing acting,” says Williams. “We really didn’t get credit for performing.” Moss-Bachrach can relate—not necessarily through his time on Girls, but through his recent stint as “cousin” Richie on The Bear. “How come your restaurant opens at 3 p.m.?” he remembers one fan asking him. The answer: “It’s a fake restaurant on a show that I don’t write.”
This level of overfamiliarity made fans feel extremely comfortable telling Williams exactly how they felt about her character—specifically, “how much they hated her.” But time has been kinder to Marnie, at least according to Williams’s father, longtime news anchor Brian Williams. “My dad, who loves lurking on social media, sends me all these Girls-rewatch clips of people rewatching the show and reacting to it. And he always is like, ‘The comments are so pro-Marnie!’” she says. “My parents were Marnie defenders for a decade, and now they’re like, Oh, it’s just a pro-Marnie world.”
She even has a theory to explain this. “What was coded as selfishness among millennials is now coded as self-care,” she says. “Gen Z is like, No, we get her. She makes sense to us. She, I guess, was just before her time.” Moss-Bachrach has a slightly different interpretation: “Now that level of narcissism, that’s just baseline.”
Below, Williams and Moss-Bachrach chat more about Girls, The Bear, Fellow Travelers, and a certain Desi-Marnie sex scene that still gets people talking.
Allison Williams: This was something I debated talking about, but we have one scene in particular that was instantly iconic and that people I do not know talk to me about all the time. It was a scene where your face was in my butt.