Michelle Williams Wants Friend Busy Philipps to Play Her in a Biopic: 'She Would Get It Right'

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If anyone's portraying Michelle Williams in a film, she wants it to be her best friend.

The Fabelmans actress, 42, walked the carpet at the Gotham Awards in New York City Monday night with her longtime friend, Busy Philipps. Speaking to PEOPLE, the Oscar nominee said she'd choose her Dawson's Creek costar to play her in a biopic.

"She knows me better than anybody," Williams says. "It's not an obvious choice, because we're very different."

Elaborating more on why she chose Philipps, 43, Williams says "because she knows every last detail about me, so she would get it right."

The friends first met on the set of Dawson's Creek when Philipps joined the show in 2001. By that point, Williams was in her third year as Jen Lindley, and the two would both end up staying on the show until its end in 2003.

At Monday's event, as Williams accepted a performer tribute award, she gave a sweet shoutout to the beloved show and to her former co-star Mary Beth Peil, who played her "grams" on the show.

She said that Peil made her a "somebody" at a time when she wasn't even a high school graduate. She encouraged Williams to pursue theater, to move to New York City and to follow her passions.

Williams shared that Peil "showed me that creativity was more than a mere profession. And all of this vitality was miraculously turned in my direction. Her smiling face was looking at me, and she called me her girl."

Philipps shared her own emotions at watching her friend receive the award and give Peil a "beautiful" shoutout: "obviously I cried." She also revealed that Peil was meant to attend the award show with them, but didn't feel well.

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The mother of three also went on to express her gratitude for the show in general, crediting it for paving the way for the career she's since built.

"I am grateful for this honor because it allows me to look backwards in time and realize that I couldn't have played Wendy Carroll [in Wendy and Lucy] or Randi Chandler [in Manchester by the Sea] or Marilyn [Monroe in My Week with Marilyn] or Gwen [Verdon in Fosse/Verdon] or Mitzi Fabelman [in The Fabelmans] without having first played Jen Lindley," said Williams.

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While she's grateful for the experience it gave her, Williams still has some qualms about her days on Dawson's Creek.

"It was a very different kind of television. We did 22 episodes a year, you'd be getting scripts sort of at the last minute and you had like zero input," she said during a Variety Actors on Actors discussion in 2019. "That was hard, it was a little bit like a factory job. It was formulaic."

Though she called the show "an incredible learning experience" and "very formative," she acknowledged that she wasn't "yearning to repeat" another project like it once the show ended because she "didn't want to be told what to do."

"I don't think I've done television in between then and now because of a fear of loss of input."