Michelle Williams found it "hard work" to shake typecasting after starring in ‘Dawson’s Creek’.
The 38-year-old actress, who played Jen Lindley in the hit teen drama series from 1998 until 2003, has admitted she felt like she was left with a "stain" on her when she left the show and auditioned for big screen roles.
In an interview with Vulture magazine, she said: "When I got out of television, it felt like a stain on you.
"It was hard work to erase it and to ask to be looked at in a different new way."
The ‘Venom’ star also admitted she felt like she had "no say" when it came to her character.
She said: "Scripts come at you and you have no say. You feel like an eternal child."
The Oscar-winner is back on the small screen as Gwen Verdon in FX’s drama series, ‘Fosse/Verdon’, and says it was important for her to find a role where she wouldn’t be forced to do anything she didn’t want to do.
She admitted: "I was afraid of putting myself in a position where I was going to commit to something and then eventually be asked to do something that I didn’t want to do."
Michelle recently compared working on ‘Dawson’s Creek’ to a "factory job".
The ‘Greatest Showman’ star was reluctant to go back to the small screen because of her experience playing Jen.
She said: "I must have still been doing ‘Dawson’s Creek’ when we did The Station Agent.
"Doing ‘Dawson’s Creek’ for six-and-a-half years, while it was an incredible learning experience — we did 22 episodes a year, and you’d be getting scripts at the last minute and you had zero input. It was a little like a factory job. It was formulaic."
Michelle admitted her reluctance to return to television was because she worried she wouldn’t have any "input" into the project but is glad she accepted ‘Fosse/Verdon’ because things have moved on so much.
She added: "I don’t think I’ve done television in between then and now because of a fear of loss of input.
"When this came around, people had been saying for a long time, ‘Television is different now.’ And I could see that that was true and that it was something that I should open myself up to.
"It’s the great advantage of aging, that we actually get more facility with the thing that we do."
Michelle Williams felt typecast after Dawson’s Creek
