It’s a late-summer evening in leafy Connecticut, New York, and Allison Williams is nervous. The trailer for her new film – an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel Regretting You – has just dropped, sending the internet into a frenzy of mixed opinions.
As we speak, the 37-year-old actor is sitting on the verandah of her home, where she lives with her husband, fellow actor Alexander Dreymon, their three-year-old son, Arlo, and their 10-year-old golden-mix dog, Moxie.
“I love reading Colleen’s books, which is also what made it super intimidating to play one of her characters,” she says. “All of her [stories] are so resonant. Her characters are three-dimensional and interesting, and the plot is always super compelling. It’s a high bar … I’m hoping that it resonates at least somewhat with what everyone else has been picturing.”
Given the scale of Hoover’s fandom, it’s understandable that Williams might be worried about their response to the film.
The American author has sold more than 30 million books since self-publishing her first novel, Slammed, in 2012. On TikTok, Hoover’s audience is tapped in, with the #colleenhoover hashtag boasting more than four billion views.
Regretting You is the second book-to-screen adaptation, after last year’s controversial It Ends With Us, which saw Blake Lively accuse her co-star and the film’s director, Justin Baldoni, of sexual harassment. It will be followed by Reminders of Him (starring Maika Monroe and Lauren Graham) and then Verity (starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson) in 2026.
Regretting You is told from the two perspectives of Morgan (played by Williams) and her daughter, Clara (Mckenna Grace).
After a teenage Morgan falls pregnant with Clara, she spends the rest of her life determined to prevent her daughter from repeating the same mistakes. As a result, Clara feels suffocated by her mother’s rule-abiding caution and their relationship becomes fractured. The one person who keeps peace between them is Clara’s father and Morgan’s husband, Chris (Scott Eastwood).
So when Chris dies suddenly in a tragic car accident, Morgan and Clara’s relationship becomes more strained as they navigate their grief. Rounding out the cast is Willa Fitzgerald as Morgan’s sister, Jenny, and Dave Franco as Jenny’s boyfriend, Jonah.
In true Hoover-style, the aftermath of the accident reveals secrets and betrayals that force mother and daughter to confront their past and redefine their relationship.
“I found Morgan to be relatable in that I can sometimes find myself blocking my ability to enjoy something with my thinking, worries or fears,” explains Williams. “She has spent her whole life doing ‘the right thing’ to the point where she’s ended up as an adult who doesn’t even know what she loves, what drives her or what her interests are.
Then she’s given this opportunity, through devastating circumstances, to ask herself, ‘What do I want to do with the rest of the years that I have here?’” Williams became a mother at 33, so she initially found it difficult to relate to Morgan as a teen mum.
“[Their relationship] felt like a version of motherhood that’s so unimaginable to me,” she says. Still, she was able to parlay some of her parenting experience into the role. And she knows how to make a hit. In 2012, Williams landed a part in a new HBO series called Girls, a slightly grittier millennial answer to Sex and the City.
The cast was composed of four then-unknown women – Lena Dunham (the series creator), Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet and Williams – as they navigated life, love and New York City in their twenties.
For six seasons, Williams made audiences cringe, roll their eyes, and even find small moments of connection with her perfectionist, self-absorbed and largely tone-deaf character, Marnie Michaels.
After Girls, Williams quickly proved the scope of her talents by pivoting into horror for Jordan Peele’s Get Out. The chilling film tells the story of a Black man who visits his white girlfriend’s (Williams) family estate, only to uncover a terrifying conspiracy hidden beneath their seemingly liberal façade.
The movie was a huge box office success, winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 2018, with Williams receiving high praise from critics for her performance.
Since then, she has continued to capture audiences’ attention, most notably in M3GAN, a sci-fi thriller in which she played a roboticist at a high-tech toy company who creates a doll that ultimately turns on its creator. The sequel, M3GAN 2.0, was released earlier this year.
Now, as Williams pivots once again (into the BookTok romance space with Regretting You) she is excited to try something new and sink her teeth into a role with great emotional depth.
“The story unpacks grief in a compelling and real way, so I spent a lot of time contemplating what it would feel like to grieve someone when it’s very complicated,” she says. “I have lost people I love deeply, and everyone experiences it so individually. In our movie, you get to see a bunch of people grieving simultaneously in completely different ways. It strips you down to your core, and you have to pick yourself up and start to feel what life is going to be like with that person-sized hole in it.”
After It Ends With Us grossed $US351 million worldwide and broke the record as the biggest romantic drama in six years (since A Star is Born), there’s undoubtedly a lot of pressure and expectation riding on Regretting You.
But, for Williams, her only hope for the project is delivering a film that lives up to the expectations of the reader. “[This will] hopefully be an example of how to take these books with such textured, deep, intimate portrayals of character and put them on a screen,” she reflects.
“In the book, we are so intimately involved in the characters’ experience that it is almost impossible to replicate that on screen. It was quite a challenge, and I’m really proud to say that we’ve done a very good job of bringing this book that we all loved to life.”
Regretting You is in cinemas from October 23.
