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Allison Williams has done and will continue to do excellent work in movies and television shows across eras and genres. But no audience will ever forget the moment her character Rose Armitage turned to her boyfriend Chris, who frantically begged her for keys to escape the mad scientist’s house trapping him, helped up the missing object, and asked, “You know I can’t give you the keys, right, babe?”
That scene from the generation-defining film Get Out continues to shape our perceptions of Williams as an actor, even in her most recent movie, Kill Me, which made its debut at SXSW.
“When I watched it for the first time with an audience, I actually felt the legacy of the other parts I’ve played,” Williams tells Den of Geek. “The audience was doubting me in a way I could feel around me. There was like suspicion around [her character] Margot in a way that we didn’t really think about or emphasize at all while we were working on the movie. There was a hangover there. I have a reputation with this group of people.”
Such is the burden of being a Scream Queen, a title she’s earned through her great work in Get Out, M3GAN, and The Perfection. It’s a burden that her Kill Me co-stars Charlie Day and Giancarlo Esposito know well, even if the two of them are better known for different types of roles.
Those past performances all enrich the tapestry of Kill Me, a comedy thriller written and directed by Peter Warren. Day stars as Jimmy, a depressed man who wakes up after what appears to be a suicide attempt. As he and 911 operator Margot (Williams) investigate further, with the help of his psychologist (Esposito), they uncover a knottier chain of events.
While Kill Me certainly plays on the comedy chops that Day has been developing for more than two decades on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the film also asks him to deal with subject matter not often associated with humor.
“I was psyched to try some serious stuff. Often, I would ask if we had to go for a joke in some parts, if we could be a little more serious,” Day recalls. “But you also need humor, otherwise it would just be a slog. The movie holds the two together so well, it hits that narrow target.
“But I love making comedy. As soon as we finished, I asked, ‘Can I stop crying?’ It was fun to do both genres.”
For Giancarlo Esposito, whose work as Buggin’ Out in Do the Right Thing or Mike Giardello in Homicide: Life on the Street has been overshadowed by his performance as villains such as Breaking Bad‘s Gus Fring, Kill Me gave him a chance to be someone who helps other people.
“It felt great to find a new balance and play someone who really wants to know about another human being. He knows that Jimmy needs help, but he can’t force people to take it. He can only suggest to them and try to get them to see that Jimmy’s his own worst enemy. To me, it was a very fine balance, and I’m pleased that the movie was written so well. That made it easy to just flow into the character. I didn’t need to push Jimmy, but to really just be concerned about him.”
“And I could be concerned about Charlie because he’s got a lot of stuff going on,” Esposito jokes. “Anyone who speaks so fast, it’s easy for me to say, ‘Wait a minute, slow down, take a deep breath, let me get into you a little bit. Let me understand you.’ Charlie’s portrayal was so committed that I had no choice but to sit there and listen.”
The cast also found the central conceit helped them get into character, as they were just as curious about the mystery as anyone in the movie. “It’s an interesting concept to have your main character try to solve the misadventure of their own death,” observes Esposito. “And I thought it could be any one of the characters pointed to in the script, which is a tribute to the writing.”
Where Williams also found herself trying to guess the ending when she first read the script (“I wrote my guesses in the margins!” she reveals), Day took the story as it was.
“I just went for the ride,” he admits. “I wasn’t making any assumptions or tried to solve it. I was just like, ‘Where is Peter taking me here? Where are we going?’ I read it fast, which is rare for me. Usually, scripts are laborious hell to get through because there’s a lot of stage direction, with people describing a whole doorway. This one was a page-turner, I ripped through it.”
As Esposito’s comments suggest, the actors trying to balance the seriousness and humor of Kill Me take their lead from their writer and director, Peter Warren. However, he had a long tradition to help guide him.
“Depression and comedy have a long, storied history together, for a number of reasons,” he explains. “Depression and mental illness are incredibly serious, incredibly heavy and incredibly dangerous. But they can also be dumb and annoying because it’s like your own brain is trying to kill you. It can feel like a stupid problem to have, like you’re stepping on a rake inside your own head a million times a day.
“So sometimes you have to laugh to get through it and see the absurdity of the whole thing. And I think it would have been a dishonest portrayal of depression to take it so seriously, because you have to find those moments to feel the lightness and give yourself permission to laugh.”
According to Esposito, the pleasure of Kill Me also involves the joy of seeing two people who need one another make a connection. “There’s a relief as Jimmy and Margot form this trauma-bonded relationship. You feel like it’s finally happening after they’ve both had a need. This movie is so wonderful because you get to experience real people having their needs met, however it has to happen.
“It’s funny because these things do happen, and that brings a levity to this movie that people are going to enjoy,” he predicts.
Esposito also points out that the joy comes from seeing a relationship formed by two people who are “mirror images” of one another, something that the film illustrates through the similarities between Margot and Jimmy’s apartments.
“I remember you were appalled by the condition of Margot’s apartment,” Day points out to Williams, who immediately agrees.
“I had to stop myself from tidying it. I had to remind myself that it was a live set and I can’t move things because it’s not real, it’s a set,” Williams says. “It was very messy because Margot’s a mess.”
The same is true of Day’s character Jimmy, which did put him back on familiar ground, as his Sunny character Charlie Kelly also lives in a dump. “No one sees me as refined,” he sulks for a moment, before accepting, “It’s because they know I’m not.”
That’s just a reminder that a movie like Kill Me can help Day, Williams, and Esposito all change the types of characters they play, but it can’t change who they really are.
Kill Me premiered at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival on March 12.
The post Kill Me’s Charlie Day and Allison Williams on Being a Comedy King and Scream Queen appeared first on Den of Geek.
