But Williams will say that she found it nurturing, and healing, to work with Reichardt and company. She found a sense of family that had long eluded her.

“I started off in community theater, and I think something about that stuck with me,” she explains. “There’s this consistency, and some kind of family feeling. I’d always wanted to be part of a troupe, working with the same people. You know, people come in and people come out, but you always get back together for something. There’s a thread.

“Because otherwise, you just make all these little lives on the sets of a film, all across the globe. You get really close to people and then you have to leave. And you never really are able to stay in touch as much as you want to. …

“But this, to me, felt like a way to do that – to keep it within a family.”‘

Lohud.com says, “She divides her time between Brooklyn and a house in the country, hanging with her 3-year-old daughter, reading, being with friends.

“It is exactly what I needed,” she says of the hiatus. “I’d been going on fumes for a while. And I can just notice the change now – sometimes my head just starts to click on again, like I start to get curious about a character or a person. It’s good. But I’m not getting antsy. Not yet.”

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