‘Fo’ shiz, homie!’: Michelle Williams’ impression of Justin Timberlake is Britney’s greatest revenge

For the audiobook of Spears’s memoir, Williams delivers Timberlake’s cringeworthy lines even more scathingly and excruciatingly than they are written

The Oscars are five months away and everything is still up in the air. The Sag-Aftra strikes mean that actors can’t only not make films but are also banned from promoting them. This, combined with the WGA strikes, means that release schedules are more in flux than at any point since Covid. What’s more, some of the most-anticipated movies of the year have been enormous commercial flops. What Hollywood needs is something to repair all the fractured bonds. What it needs is a new Oscar category for audiobook narration, and Michelle Williams needs to win it.

If you’ve been even remotely online over the last few weeks, you will know three things. The first is that Britney Spears has released her memoir, The Woman in Me. The second is that Justin Timberlake comes out of it abysmally, not least because he reportedly thought that the best way to soothe his girlfriend in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic secret abortion was with his own talents as a singer and guitarist. The third is that Michelle Williams has narrated the audiobook of The Woman in Me, and she clearly doesn’t like Justin Timberlake very much.