Such a sweet soul! Michael Pitt gushed about his former Dawson’s Creek costar Michelle Williams in a Q&A published Thursday, July 10, by Elle.
“When I met Michelle Williams, I flew down there and she took me under her wing,” Pitt recalled of the show’s Wilmington, North Carolina set. “I was, like, living a double life. I was living in the projects in Fort Greene [Brooklyn] on my own since I was 15. I lived in this place that was kind of Murder Avenue. You were happy when people got shot because it meant that the cops came around.”
“So I was going from this world where I didn’t even have a TV and had to tell [the network] not to send a limo because one limo driver got f—ed up in front of my house,” Pitt, now age 33, explained to Elle. “I’m going back and forth between these two worlds. I didn’t want them to know—I felt like, ‘Oh my God, if these people know something like that, they’ll fire me.'”
Pitt, who starred as recurring character Henry Parker from 1999 to 2000, said his storyline on Dawson’s Creek, in some ways, mimicked real life. (Henry briefly dated Williams’ character Jen Lindley on the smash series.)
“Michelle Williams, when I got down there, did something that was really amazing,” he recalled. “She drove me to the bookstore and she just went through the bookstore and said, ‘You gotta read this, this, and this.'” He also revealed that one of her favorite books was by Hermann Hesse, although he forgot the title. “Man. That was a long time ago,” he marveled.
Since his Dawson’s Creek days, Pitt has become best known for playing Jimmy Darmody on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. Up next, he stars in the new sci-fi movie, I Origins.