Marnie Michaels on “Girls” is one of the great TV characters of the 21st century, and fortunately General Z helped boost the popularity of the vain New Yorker played by Allison Williams, even though the initial response to the character was that Williams was actually 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 about one particular moment from the show that has become even more of a meme of late.
No, not the moment when Marnie sarcastically sings Kanye West’s “harder.” It’s a moment with a little more applicability to someone who tries something bold and fails. The moment when Marnie said, “Let’s make fun of the girl who took a risk and put herself out there creatively.” It happened in Season 3, Episode 4, “Dead Inside,” when a music video Marnie filmed for a song with lyrics like “Religion Is The Smile on the Face of A Dog” suddenly went viral on YouTube.
“I’m so proud, honestly,” Williams told ET of how the moment was transformed into a meme . To underscore that pride, she pressed her hands to her heart at that point in the interview. “When I saw it, it applied to the Max name change — HBO Max — it made me so happy.” Funny enough, this meme was invoked by Warner Bros.’ own Discovery 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, too. The line was separately applied online to the creative risks taken by TikTok pop artist Addison Rae, to which Williams said, “She’s amazing and no one should 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’s defending a totally inappropriate music video.”
