Allison Williams and Cynthia Nixon Talk About "Girls" and "Sex and the City" Cynthia Nixon, left, moved to TV and "Sex and the City" after a long career in the theater. "Girls" was the first audition for Allison Williams. She was cast 10 days later. Fourteen years apart, Cynthia Nixon and Allison Williams created roles in two groundbreaking series, both on HBO, that captured for their respective generations the confounding experience of being a young single woman in New York: Miranda Hobbes on "Sex and the City," which aired from 1998 to 2004, and Marnie Michaels on "Girls," which had its debut in 2012 and began its third season last week. Ms. Nixon came to TV after a long career in the theater, including (when she was just 18 years old) simultaneous roles in "Hurlyburly" and "The Real Thing" on Broadway, dashing from one theater to the other each evening to pull off this feat. Since then, she has acted in film, TV and theater, collecting two Emmy Awards and a Tony Award for Best Actress for her role in "Rabbit Hole" in 2006. Ms. Williams, the daughter of the NBC News anchor Brian Williams, had a somewhat shorter résumé when she auditioned for "Girls," most notably a music video that layered Nat King Cole's "Nature Boy" over the theme of "Mad Men" - and which Judd Apatow, one of the producers of "Girls," saw, prompting him to call her agents to arrange an audition. She is soon to start filming the fourth season of "Girls." "I told my parents I wanted to do what they did in "The Wizard of Oz."" - ALLISON WILLIAMS Robert Caplin for The New York Times Recently, the two actresses came together for Sunday breakfast at Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria (the day and time chosen because it was the only break Ms. Williams had in her current publicity tour for "Girls" and because it allowed Ms. Nixon to spend the rest of the day with her wife, Christine Marinoni, and the three children they are raising together). Over eggs, cheese and porchetta (for Ms. Nixon) and yogurt with granola, apples and honey (for Ms. Williams), they discussed with The New York Times starting out young, big breaks, Bill de Blasio and the surprising fact that their paths had never before crossed. PHILIP GALANES: So, you two don't know each other? PG: There's no HBO clubhouse? CN: Well, we go to midnight meetings, but we don't admit it. PG: I'm wondering, what made the two of you want to be actors so young? Escapism? Attention? AW: I don't know about you, but even before I knew what acting was, I told my parents I wanted to do what they did in "The Wizard of Oz," where one person plays two people and can put on different costumes. That's how I articulated it the first time. I was about 4. It was dress up. CN: I started at 12. When I was growing up in New York, it was a golden age for child actors: Ally Sheedy and Justin Henry, Jodie Foster and Tatum O'Neal. Quinn Cummings from "The Goodbye Girl" and Ricky Schroder from "The Champ." So it seemed possible, not some glassed-off world. My mother had been an actress and knew people in the business. It sounds funny now to say I started at 12, but - AW: It could have been much earlier. CN: Right. We were very conscious of not starting me too soon. And when I was 12, I did this film, "Little Darlings," with Tatum O'Neal, who was my idol, and Kristy McNichol. We shot for 10 weeks in Georgia, and it was my first year at Hunter High School, which is a very hard school. And when I got home, my parents and I looked at each other and said, "We can never do that again." After that, I was tyrannical about what jobs I would take and what they would have to give me. Like when I was cast in "Amadeus" with Milos Forman, which was shooting in Europe, I said, "I want to be in your film so much, but I have a request: If I don't shoot for two days in a row, you have to send me home." They agreed. AW: That's because you're so good. If you weren't, they'd be like, all right, see ya. CN: But you know what else it is: I wasn't asking for a bigger trailer or better billing. I was asking to be in school, and they respected that. AW: But you also advocated for your own development. Because in this industry - CN: People will take whatever they can get from you. AW: Exactly. CN: And leave you broken and crumpled by the side of the road. PG: Which happened to Tatum O'Neal. CN: It happens to everyone. AW: The other thing that makes us so lucky is our foundation - CN: From your parents? AW: Yeah, my parents, my family, my oldest friends. Because no matter what crazy thing I do, when I come back, they're who I'm coming back to. I'm always coming back down to size. PG: So, Cynthia, the amazing Broadway career continues all through the "90s: "The Heidi Chronicles," "Angels in America," and then comes "Sex and the City." Had TV even occurred to you? CN: Are you kidding me? I would have been delighted to do TV - even crappy TV. But I didn't want to move to L.A. And there was nothing here except "Law and Order," until "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City." I didn't mean to hold out for the great one, but the great one happened to come along, and I was here. And also because my wonderful agent said, "Could you please put on a little makeup for this audition?" PG: When a show really connects, like "Sex and the City" did, and it's huge, does the phenomenon overtake everything else - like acting in it? CN: "Sex and the City" was bigger than anything I had ever done, and probably ever will do, but from the beginning of my career, I was in big projects. "Amadeus," Mike Nichols and William Hurt, Jeremy Irons. I'd been connected with big things. PG: You're having a similar moment now, Allison, cast in this buzzy show, right out of the gate. Had you even started auditioning yet? AW: "Girls" was my first audition. I'd just taken an audition class, and I was excited to implement those tools. But I still had moving boxes in my apartment. I'm a master assembler of Ikea furniture, in case anyone wants to know. So I went to the audition thinking: Great start. I read the script, and was blown away. And when I went into the audition room, it was all women, which is so rare. We did improv, scenes with Lena. It was a dream experience. Then they gave me more scenes and a film test. PG: Did it take forever to land the part? AW: No, it was fast. I was cast in 10 days. PG: And when you got it, did you trust that you were ready for it? Of acting, Ms. Nixon said, "I started at 12. When I was growing up in New York, it was a golden age for child actors. AW: Only because it felt like the trick to the job was not acting at all. I prepared so much for the first day, but the minute I got on set, I realized, I'm not supposed to do anything, I'm just supposed to exist and say the words as they're written. PG: Because the character resonates so deeply with you? AW: Because so much of it is on the page. But yes, there's a big overlap in the Venn diagram between Marnie and me, but it's getting further apart as time goes on. PG: That's funny, I would think the writers would build more of you into the character over time. CN: That's certainly what happened to me. Other than being sort of brainy, I don't think I had anything in common with Miranda. I wasn't single, I wasn't sarcastic. I'm a career person, but not like she was. My mother once told someone we looked alike, that was about it. But I feel like they started writing for me and who I am, making her a mother. PG: That seems inevitable. CN: But you're saying it's happening in reverse? AW: Well, fundamentally, Marnie is passionless and - CN: I don't think that's true. AW: She doesn't know what she's passionate about. Is it art, is it music? PG: Well, that's different. AW: And she's a little bit passionless. PG: I'm drawn to characters whose hearts are a little walled off and cold at the beginning, because you know there's a good back story - CN: You know they're not phonies. AW: What I mean is that she's purposefully passionless. She sees excessive display of emotion as weakness. She's very WASP-y, keep it to yourself, deal with it yourself, be perfect. But the only reason I'm playing her is because I've been so passionate about doing this one thing my whole life. PG: Let me ask you a cynical question, which I can do now because it's all turned out so well. The earliest buzz about "Girls" was that HBO found four daughters of four famous people - AW: Think about that for two seconds. PG: Your dad is Brian Williams, and there's David Mamet's daughter and Laurie Simmons's daughter. ... AW: If you were doing stunt casting, wouldn't you pick big movie stars and put their kids in it? PG: Good point. AW: And Lena didn't know who any of us were. She thought Zosia's last name was pronounced ma-MAY - some French Canadian actress. PG: Here's a cheeky question: How many of the other characters on your show could you play really well? I'm terrified of this question. CN: I think I could have played everybody but Samantha. I mean, I could play Samantha now, but not when I was 30. AW: I have no idea. Hannah is the one I have most access to. CN: Really? AW: Yeah, because of her single-mindedness and putting her foot in her mouth. Jessa is the furthest from me. But I'd like to think I could do a good job with any of them. PG: Have you noticed that when people talk about your shows, they love to make the characters stand in for all women - and in the case of "Sex and the City," for all gay men, too? AW: It's strange, because other shows aren't expected to speak for large groups of people. PG: We don't do that to men. CN: But I think our show was deliberately written that way. There's Athena, Aphrodite, Hera - and Sarah Jessica. I'm not sure who she is. Cynthia Nixon and Allison Williams at Sunday breakfast recently at Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria in NoHo. AW: Zeus? CN: I remember one time Sarah Jessica was having this conversation with Jerry Seinfeld, and he matched up the characters on "Seinfeld" with ours. Jerry was Carrie, Kramer was Samantha, I was - what's Jason Alexander's character's name? PG: George? CN: Anyway, before, when you were a girl, you were forced to identify with the one girl on the show. But now it's like, which one of those girls am I? You're not usually given a sampler plate. PG: And 10 years and a million reruns later, we get a new show with four girls. AW: Did you know our show started as three girls? Marnie, Jessa and Hannah. Shoshanna was only supposed to come in occasionally. But she was so good they elevated her to a fourth girl. PG: Another thing that's happened in 10 years is more audience schadenfreude and jealousy. How do you feel about "Girls" backlash and online haters - the idea of hate-watching a show? AW: I never look at anything. Do you? CN: I read reviews in the paper, but I'm not an online person. That's where they're really nasty. AW: Where anonymity protects them. CN: But building up toughness is important. In any creative field, you have to get used to people saying: "No, we don't want you. Go away. You have to develop a callus. PG: To me, the best thing about your shows is how specific the worlds are - no generic network junk. But that's proved fertile ground for criticism: too affluent, too white. Is that fair? CN: Whenever you make a show about an underrepresented group, like women, you're going to show some good things about that specific group and some bad things. There are a lot of people in New York who exist in a very white and affluent world. Hopefully, we're going to see some change. But you wouldn't want to show a rosier picture of integration than actually existed, would you? PG: Did you go on that apology tour with Lena, for not having a woman of color on your show? AW: I think what Lena said to Terry Gross was right: She was writing her experience, and she didn't want to presume to know other people's experiences for the sake of inclusion. That just leads to sloppy mistakes and tokenism. CN: When a show hits big, it's because it's showing something true that the culture hasn't caught up with yet. "Sex and the City" showed the world unmarried women in their 30s who weren't upset about it. And one of the things "Girls" seems to be about is coming of age in a shrinking economy, with your affluent parents in the background. AW: With Marnie, you see even more of that this season. She's sleeping on her mom's couch at the beginning of the season, but her mom had to move into a small condo because she left her dad. PG: Seems like a perfect transition to Mayor de Blasio - especially since you were so prominent at the inauguration! AW: I loved seeing you out there. PG: As a lesbian, did you wrestle with supporting de Blasio when there was a lesbian candidate in the race? CN: No wrestling. I've known Bill for 10 years, and my wife's known him even longer. I've worked side by side with him, fighting for public-school funding. And he is a unique combination of someone with an unimpeachable liberal ideology, who is also a savvy politician. Usually, you get a savvy politician whose ethics are not so great, or somebody who's ethically perfect but can't get anything done. Bill is an amazing hybrid. And for me, with kids in the public schools, having a sitting mayor who is also a public school parent - for the first time in hundreds of years - is also amazing. PG: Hello, Dante! Allison, are you a political person? But I need lots more information before I could make an eloquent argument about anything. One of the things I love about this city is how aware people are of politics and elections. And education is everything. PG: Would you be comfortable speaking out on political issues, or is that something you have to grow into? AW: I was going to ask Cynthia that. What's the earliest point you could have given your speech at the inauguration? CN: I don't feel like I made a speech. I feel like I introduced Patina Miller. AW: You got up and said words at a microphone on television. PG: It's called a speech. CN: From the time I was 13, at a Naral rally, I guess. My mother was the culture vulture in our family, but my dad was always the political guy. The first 35 years of my life were about acting, and then my dad's influence has started to weigh in more and more. PG: So, if you went home and had two messages, one says: "Run the city's Department of Cultural Affairs," for which you were reported to be a candidate, and the other says, "Here's a role as good as "Rabbit Hole," " which would you take? CN: I have no interest in being in politics, zero. PG: Allison, of course, would take the Department of Cultural Affairs. AW: Definitely. I'm perfect for the job. I'm surprised they haven't called me yet.