‘The Ring’ meets ‘Drunken Master’

This article contains spoilers from M3GAN 2.0 (though the scene in question is shown in the trailers).

M3GAN 2.0 might as well be Allison Williams’ very own M3GAN: Impossible — Fallout. There is a fallout in the sequel from the events of the 2022 film; stolen blueprints for the M3GAN doll were secretly used to create a militarized robot soldier named AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), which then went on a rampage. But also, the movie is much more of an action-thriller this time around.

One scene in particular shows Williams getting in on said action. Through an implanted neural chip, M3GAN is able to fuse with the mind of Gemma, the roboticist who created her and who brought her back to fight AMELIA. When things get a bit too hairy, M3GAN takes over Gemma’s body, now enhanced by a cybernetic exo-suit, and fights a group of soldiers on her behalf.

Then there’s a second portion of this sequence…A punch to the face knocks Gemma out, forcing M3GAN to completely puppeteer her unconscious body to keep the fight going.

Williams, who’s also a producer on the film, and writer-director Gerard Johnstone break down how they pulled off this feat.

“Because I’m part of the development, it takes me a minute to realize that all the things with that character name are going to be my responsibility,” Williams tells Entertainment Weekly. “So it took me a minute to realize I was going to have to speak as myself and M3GAN at the same time at some point, that I’d have to be in my body that M3GAN’s in charge of but that my mind is observing, also that I’d be unconscious in a body that M3GAN is controlling.”

For the portion with the unconscious Gemma, Johnstone points out Williams’ “healthy head of hair, which I was sure that we could use.”

He says, “One of the early ideas for that fight sequence was, it should feel like Samara from The Ring meets Drunken Master. So she should have her hair in front of her face the whole time, and that would help us. What ended up happening is that Allison trained very, very hard and ended up doing a lot of that herself. You can see it in the film. There’s no deepfake in those sequences where you can clearly see it’s her. You can also clearly see the look of glee on her face as she’s doing it.”

Williams trained with Jason Walsh, a personal trainer to the stars who, she says, “trains people for Avengers movies.” Brie Larson was one of Walsh’s notable clients ahead of her turn as Captain Marvel. “I loved the action part of my job in this movie,” Williams continues. “One of the things I loved about the movie was that it was very meta. Gemma’s like, I can’t believe I’m in an action movieand also I can’t believe I’m in one. So we’re kind of having the same experience.”

She relates the performance of M3GAN in Gemma’s unconscious body to a scene of hers in Get Outwhere her character, Rose, calls Lil Rel Howery’s Rod with a frantic message but delivers it with a blank face. Williams drilled her facial expressions and movements for M3GAN 2.0 in her rental house in Auckland until she got it right.

“I did so many of those…that Photo Booth thing on a MacBook that no one ever uses, that’s like, here are these weird filters,” the actress recalls. “I used that to do version after version after version of the M3GAN and Gemma talking simultaneously, and also what it would look like to watch myself do action movements. All of that was so much harder than I could possibly have anticipated, and it was such an honor to be given those assignments by Gerard.”

Johnstone always says, “My eyes are bigger than my stomach,” in terms of writing ambitious sequences before knowing how he’ll logistically pull them off. “In a way, the character of M3GAN is so bombastic that I just feel like if we’re going to do it, these need to be memorable action sequences,” he says. “We can’t just do enough to get by.”

The director used to be roommates with Isaac Hamon, his stunt coordinator on M3GAN 2.0and the two had long dreamed of making an action movie together. In many ways, this title is their action movie, as M3GAN 2.0 leans more heavily into the action-thriller genre than it does traditional horror. That direction stemmed from the plot he was writing.

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“The idea of M3GAN’s secrets getting out, the technology behind her being acquired by someone else, it just made sense it would be the military,” Johnstone explains. “I just really felt like these movies have to be a reflection of the conversations that we’re having in the world that we live in. Definitely AI and warfare was one of the hot topics at the time I started writing the movie.”

So is Williams now ready for her James Bond era? “I would love that. I am available to be James Bond,” she jokes. “That would be such a hilarious twist in my career…and the right one, I think.”

M3GAN 2.0 is now playing in theaters.