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Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier, Vogue, February 2013

traveled to Japan to give us a taste of Shoshanna’s new Technicolor life. This week, it was Marnie’s turn to take the lead with her own capsule episode, which felt equally far away.

, opens with Allison Williams’s Marnie miserable and in the midst of a fight with her new husband, Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). The show starts off oppressively quotidian (“I don’t want to get a scone with you this morning and now I’m cruel?” Marnie wails) and turns into a madcap fever dream after she runs into her old flame, Charlie (Christopher Abbott), on the street. Charlie, who was so doe-eyed and simpering just three seasons ago, has now transformed into a more confident, grittier version of his former self. After a few awkward exchanges, real life quickly fades away as the two embark on a down-the-rabbit-hole romp in which Marnie pretends to be a high-class hooker (named Migita Perez) and winds up in Charlie’s decrepit drug den, where she is forced to confront her own sobering reality.

It was a wildly different experience for the exasperating, type A Marnie and an exciting, anxiety-laden experience for the 27-year-old actress. “I was very aware about how people felt about Marnie, which made me nervous leading up to the episode,” Williams told Vogue.com. “I was afraid that people would hear it was a Marnie episode and not even tune in. But I tried to make it clear that, even if you don’t like her, this episode is something to behold.”

Here, we talk to Williams about reuniting with her long-lost on-screen boyfriend, how it feels to play an unlikable character, and her habit of walking barefoot in New York City.

One of my favorite lines from the first episode of this season was during Marnie’s wedding when she said to Hannah, “The very least you could do right now is to pretend that I’m doing the right thing.” This new episode destroys the pretense that Marnie has her life under control.

Totally. And how satisfying is that? It is nice to see her being completely in the moment, unable to think ahead, and actively trying not to be judgmental or even being considerate of Charlie’s situation. She’s trying not to think too hard about anything and just experience the night as it happens to her. And isn’t it ironic that the one night she turns off her judgment antenna, she really could have used it, because she ends up in an apartment with a heroin-using, very dark, very lost and gone Charlie.

Charlie’s sudden departure came as an emotional blow to viewers back in season two. It was amazing how seeing him after all these years really did mimic the sensation of running into an ex.

Yeah, it was really meta. And it was even meta for me, because I hadn’t seen him since he left the show. I actually found that we had very few conversations, which mirrored the one that Marnie and Charlie had—

I kind of just focused on channeling that into the episode itself and tried to infuse the episode with my real-life sense of, like,

You just kind of left, dude. How could you leave this?

I just left all those dynamics for Marnie to have in those scenes.

Lena Dunham said that she wrote the episode without knowing whether or not Christopher Abbott would even be interested in returning to the show. Were you aware that she had written this and was trying to get him?

I think I was aware. I cared so much about the episode and was so thrilled that it was happening and so worried that something would happen to change it, so I kind of didn’t ask; I almost didn’t want progress reports. So I know very little about how that all went down.

This was obviously a very physically demanding episode—there are underwater stunts, you get mugged at one point. What was the hardest part of the shoot?

The hardest thing was the underwater work. I’ve never done anything in the water before. I always thought it would be hard, but I had no idea how challenging it would be. First of all, swimming in sneakers and a dress is really hard; it’s heavy, it limits your ability to move. And staying underwater with eyes wide open, emoting, breathing so that you don’t have too many bubbles sitting right in your nostrils, is difficult. The stunt of falling out of the boat was treacherous because we were in a lake that you definitely did not want to go into.

Between a dirty lake and walking around in a sequined red gown while barefoot in New York City, I hope you’re not a germaphobe.

No, I’m not at all. The funny thing is—and I’m not proud of this—I walk barefoot a lot. Almost every time I came back from some kind of event in New York, I used to walk barefoot from the car to my apartment and probably still would if there weren’t the threat of potential cameras outside my apartment. I’m not even, like, an earthy person. I have big, long, flat feet and they’re not really comfortable in shoes. So it weirdly didn’t bother me. What bugged me was being in public in that red dress, with paparazzi knowing that the dress was being spoiled. And it sucked to be soaking wet for that long, like in the subway and on the street. But all that was fun for me. I am a weird glutton for that kind of stuff.

You’ve said that people freely come up to you and tell you that they dislike your character. What’s that like?

Really strange. It’s almost always like, “You seem really nice, but I hate Marnie.” It’s weird when you’ve been playing someone for this long; by the time the show’s all said and done, I think I will have been playing Marnie for seven years. I’ve spent my 20s half in her body and half in mine. We got married at the same time. She’s younger than I am at this point; I’ve grown out of her in terms of the timeline of our show, which is weird. I can’t help but take it personally, but it’s this very weird schizophrenic moment. I used to try to make people like her in that one conversation, which is already very un-Marnie-like. Marnie would be like, “Well, fuck you, too. Bye.” I’ve always wanted to try to explain her to them and win them over, but in the last couple years I’m like, “Yep, I know it’s a thing.”

You said that a lot of people have connected to this episode. Do you think seeing Marnie develop over time has gone a long way to making her more accessible or likable to audiences?

I hope so. As interesting and fantastic as it was to watch, I think if anyone thought about it very hard, all that Marnie is would have saved her from this depressing situation, but it also would have kept her from having this incredibly important realization about the change she needs to make in her life. I think even seeing her in her normal vibe next week, people will go into it knowing her so much better and, I think, will be much more forgiving and will finally be seeing her, like I’ve always seen her, which is from a place of real empathy and understanding. I’m really glad to have finally had the chance to introduce people to the Marnie that I’ve always known her to be—in a context I’ve never imagined her to be in. My hope is that no one will be able to look at her the same way.