Allison Williams

Allison Howell Williams is an American actress and film producer. After starting her career in comedy, she achieved wide recognition and earned the reputation of a horror queen beginning in the late 2010s. Her work has earned her a National Board of Review Award alongside nominations at the Critics' Choice, GMSA, and Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Born on April 13, 1988, in Hartford, Connecticut, Williams was raised in New Canaan, Connecticut. She is the daughter of former NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams and TV producer Jane Gillan Stoddard, and she has a younger brother, Doug. Williams attended New Canaan Country School, Greenwich Academy, and Yale University. While at Yale, she majored in English, performed with the improv comedy troupe Just Add Water, starred in the YouTube series College Musical, and appeared in a viral promotional video for the university before graduating in 2010.

Williams began gaining online attention in 2010 after performing a musical mashup of Nature Boy to the Mad Men theme song. The performance led Judd Apatow to cast her in the HBO comedy-drama series Girls, in which she starred from 2012 to 2017 and earned a Critics' Choice Award nomination. During this period, she also appeared in the web series Jake and Amir, played the title role in NBC's Peter Pan Live! in 2014, wrote and starred in Funny or Die sketches as Kate Middleton, and appeared in the short film Past Forward.

In 2017, Williams made her feature film debut starring as Rose in Jordan Peele's psychological horror film Get Out. Her performance as an effective villain received widespread critical acclaim and earned her a SAG Award nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Cast. She followed this with roles in the Netflix horror film The Perfection (2018), a recurring role as Kit Snicket in A Series of Unfortunate Events (2018–2019), and a starring role in the Swedish thriller Horizon Line (2020).

Williams reteamed with Blumhouse to executive produce and star as the roboticist Gemma in the science fiction horror film M3GAN (2023). The movie became a major commercial success and earned Williams strong critical praise for her performance. She went on to star in the historical miniseries Fellow Travelers (2023), produced and reprised her role in M3GAN 2.0 (2025), and starred in the romantic drama film Regretting You (2025).

In her personal life, Williams married CollegeHumor co-founder Ricky Van Veen in 2015, and the couple announced their separation in 2019. In late 2019, she began dating German actor Alexander Dreymon. The couple welcomed a son in late 2021, became engaged in late 2022, and quietly married in 2023.