Michelle Williams Talks ‘Dying for Sex,’ What Molly Would’ve Said to Her Mother and Shooting “Messed Up” Final Hospice Scene

[This story contains major spoilers from the Dying for Sex season finale.]

“I’ve never even had an orgasm with another person, and now i’m going to die,” Michelle Williams‘s Molly Kochan tearfully says in the first episode of FX‘s Dying for Sex.

Her diagnosis sparks her to leave her husband of over a decade, Steve (Jay Duplass), and embark on a journey to explore her sexual desires and kinks with herself and several random men she meets on dating apps, in addition to “Neighbor Guy” played by Rob Delaney.

Showrunners Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether adapted the series from the real-life Molly, who spoke about her experiences on a podcast with best friend Nikki Boyer (who is played by Jenny Slate in the series).

While Dying for Sex is filled with raunchy — and hilarious — scenes of Williams venturing into BDSM and trying her partner’s fetishes, all in hopes of achieving her goal (to experience an orgasm), her plight also highlights her confronting the trauma she endured at an early age, which is where her issues with sexual intimacy came from. When Molly was a child, her mother, Gail’s (Sissy Spacek) then-boyfriend spiked her mom’s drink, and while she was passed out, he molested Molly.

Throughout the series, we see Molly’s resentment for her mom, but as she’s in hospice and knows her days are almost up, she seemingly finds forgiveness. Molly begins to speak with Gail and tells her she’s ready to accept her fate; she looks at her and is about to say something else before Gail interjects, saying, “I already know. Anything you could say to me, I already know.”

Below, Williams explains how she prepped to play a character she knows will die, the emotion behind filming her final scene and how she “leapt wholeheartedly” into those wild sex scenes.

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This role is different from anything you’ve played before. Molly hears the news in the first episode that her cancer has come back after two years and it’s Stage 4. What initially attracted you to this character, and how did you prepare to play someone dying of Stage 4 cancer?

Well, she and Nikki laid out the map for us. When I signed onto this project, only one script was written. I knew how the story ended, but I didn’t know the details of everything that was going to happen in between. I had great faith in Liz [Meriwether] and her gargantuan ability to combine drama and humor. So I wanted to take that leap with her, with Jenny, with the two tremendous men, Rob Delaney and Jay Duplass. This was a tribe I wanted to be a member of.

Then we had the podcast, and we knew there was so much material they had already given us. So even though the scripts weren’t written, I could start to work off of what they had laid down. And Molly wrote a book; one of her ambitions for herself was to write and finish this book before she passed, and she did. The book really goes into her childhood and her family relationships in greater detail. So, there was so much for me already that as we were waiting for more scripts, I could start to process.

There are so many sex scenes in this show. When you were first reading the script, which scene intimidated you most? Which one were you excited about and did that change when you were filming?

The scripts kept rolling in as we were filming, so we would be in the middle of an episode and then we would get a script for the next one. To be honest, at this point, I had watched the first two and then maybe three scripts roll in, and I had felt so enlivened after reading them. While maybe in my schooled brain, or I don’t know I would term it… it’s like the way you were habituated to think or maybe what you were taught or told as a child or an adolescent. The things that you’ve tried to free yourself from as a grown woman and also as a parent of a daughter, in my attempt to untangle myself from these ideas that were given to me so that I could break from that tradition and pass something different onto my own daughter.

Perhaps I heard a tiny little alarm bell twinkling in the back of my brain, saying, “Oh, that might be embarrassing, or somebody might be upset with you, or what will so-and-so think?” But then my next thought was, “Fantastic! This is exactly what I set out to do. I want to disconnect pleasure and shame.” That’s really one of the journeys that the character goes on, so can she experience something that’s meant for her that is pleasurable without feeling bad for it, or something that’s going to befall her because of it. So I really leapt wholeheartedly into these scenarios, whether they be in masturbatory sequences or partnered with these people that she meets along the way. I relish the written words and situations that Liz had laid out in front of us.

What was Molly going to say to her mom before she died and before her mom interrupted her, telling her she already knew what she was going to say? 

Oh my gosh, probably “I love you.” But I can’t really remember because I haven’t seen the scene. So I’m not entirely sure, but that’s the first thing that comes to my mind. Or “I forgive you,” probably is more like it.

Was it as emotional as it looked to film your last scene in the series?

Ah! It was messed up — It was messed up! It really, man, it gets you. Because you spend so much time with these characters and you’ve gone through so many experiences as them that by the time you walk into the set and you realize it’s the hospice set, it tricks your brain a little bit, I have to say. When you have to get in the wheelchair and they wheel you, it hurts. It hurts to be lying down and saying goodbye to both these actors that you love and have loved working with, and then to the characters that you’ve been on these journeys with; it stings a little, I got to be honest.

At the same time, it’s suffused with so much light and so much joy because she’s doing it on her own terms, which is really what happened. And then, of course, there’s this wonderful absurdity of the dream sequence — all the things that come back to visit her. But there is an undeniable sting to it, and you have to let yourself walk fully into the room. At first, you’re a little bit afraid to cross that threshold into that hospice set because you know how it ends. But then all you can do is gather arms with everybody you’ve been working with for the past few months and go wholeheartedly into it.

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Dying for Sex is now streaming on Hulu.