In Reunited, Awards Insider hosts a conversation between two Emmy contenders who have collaborated on a previous project. Today, we speak with Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who stars in The Bear, and Allison Williams, who stars in Fellow Travelers. They previously worked together on Girls.

It’s as if almost no time has passed when onetime toxic Girls couple Allison Williams and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, wearing accidentally complementary black-and-white outfits, arrive for a reunion at Condé Nast Studios. In a nod to their characters’ musical past and wedding from hell, the set comes complete with a ukulele and a flower crown; in true Desi fashion, Moss-Bachrach makes a beeline for the instrument, strumming chords to himself before the cameras begin to roll. (Sadly, though, Williams never puts on the flower crown.)

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Music, of course, was the tie that bound Marnie and Desi, whose disastrous relationship unraveled over the course of multiple seasons on Lena Dunham’s seminal HBO comedy.

But as terrible as the characters came across on the series, the two actors say that many of Marnie and Desi’s songs were actually discarded tracks meant for Kelly Clarkson, with some having been written by Jack Antonoff, who was dating Dunham at the time. Given Antonoff’s recent success collaborating with Taylor Swift, it’s fun to imagine that there’s an alternate universe in which Marnie and Desi hit it big and are on their own Eras Tour.

In Williams’s imagination, though, post-Girls Marnie is still a struggling musician. By now, she thinks, Marnie has already gone through a second divorce; she’s “probably on the verge of deciding to have a baby on her own,” says Williams. Even more shockingly, she thinks her character has ditched New York for the burbs of Boston. Moss-Bachrach, meanwhile, sees Desi across the coast, working with “at risk” teens or bussing tables at a place like Pappy + Harriet’s, out in Joshua Tree.

Even seven years later, it’s hard not to see Marnie and Desi when these two interact—for better or for worse. “[People] fully assumed that the girls on Girls were just in a documentary series and the men were doing acting,” says Williams. “We really didn’t get credit for performing.” Moss-Bachrach can relate—not necessarily through his time on Girls, but through his recent stint as “cousin” Richie on The Bear. “How come your restaurant opens at 3 p.m.?” he remembers one fan asking him. The answer: “It’s a fake restaurant on a show that I don’t write.”

This level of overfamiliarity made fans feel extremely comfortable telling Williams exactly how they felt about her character—specifically, “how much they hated her.” But time has been kinder to Marnie, at least according to Williams’s father, longtime news anchor Brian Williams. “My dad, who loves lurking on social media, sends me all these Girls-rewatch clips of people rewatching the show and reacting to it. And he always is like, ‘The comments are so pro-Marnie!’” she says. “My parents were Marnie defenders for a decade, and now they’re like, Oh, it’s just a pro-Marnie world.”

She even has a theory to explain this. “What was coded as selfishness among millennials is now coded as self-care,” she says. “Gen Z is like, No, we get her. She makes sense to us. She, I guess, was just before her time.” Moss-Bachrach has a slightly different interpretation: “Now that level of narcissism, that’s just baseline.”

Below, Williams and Moss-Bachrach chat more about Girls, The Bear, Fellow Travelers, and a certain Desi-Marnie sex scene that still gets people talking.

Allison Williams: This was something I debated talking about, but we have one scene in particular that was instantly iconic and that people I do not know talk to me about all the time. It was a scene where your face was in my butt.

Ebon Moss-Bachrach: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Williams: We filmed it, I think, on my birthday. It was the first day of shooting for that season. And at the premiere, at which I was seated with my whole family, after that scene played, which is one of my favorite…Hold on. I wanna remember the dialogue exactly.

Moss-Bachrach: [Laughs]

Williams: I believe Desi says, “I love that.”

Moss-Bachrach: I think it’s like, “I love you,” “I love that,” or ‘this’ or something.

Williams: I think it’s, “I love that.” And Marnie says, “I love you too.” And it's a montage at the beginning of the season where you're catching up with everybody, and it’s literally all you need to know about where she is, what’s going on. The scene ends and Kathy Griffin, who’s in front of me in the theater, just slowly turns around and slow-claps in my direction after that. I was like, Well, as if I weren’t already gonna remember this for the rest of my life, I will remember it.

So I’m obsessed with The Bear, as you know. During this awards season, I had the honor of being in many rooms with you while you were winning awards. I’m sure you were out of body while it was happening, but I started to get made fun of by the Fellow Travelers cast because the minute they would call your name, I’d be, like, levitating in the air, screaming. It was the most exciting thing to watch. Your performance is so gorgeous.

Moss-Bachrach: Thanks.

Williams: I wonder what it was like being in that ensemble, because it really is—you have such spectacular moments in your episode in particular, but it is really like a family, from the outside at least. And I’m wondering what that’s like.

Moss-Bachrach: I dunno. For me, it’s not dissimilar from Girls, where you have just, like, a really good company. It takes a lot of pressure off, you know? You just feel like you're on a journey. Everyone's telling the story, so you have less of a burden on you.

And I really love actors and collaboration and being in a room with a bunch of people with a bunch of energy and having a lot of ideas. Big, messy scenes are kind of the things that I have the most fun with personally. That episode, the “Forks” one, people really love. I really didn't enjoy making that so much. It felt kind of lonely for me in this quiet restaurant. I was working with really good actors, but it wasn't my family of, like, the people that I had been working with in season one, in that kitchen—of Matty [Matheson] and Liza [Colón-Zayas] and Lionel [Boyce] and Jeremy [Allen White] and Ayo [Edebiri] and everyone. I’m an actor because I want to collaborate with people, not because I want to be by myself.

Williams: If “Forks” was a little bit lonely, what was the most fun?

Moss-Bachrach: I like the first season. It’s just like a mess. It’s like a sinking ship. People talk about kitchens, and I’ve heard somebody describe a kitchen as like being on a submarine.

I haven’t seen Fellow Travelers.

Williams: How dare you? I’m walking. [Laughs]

Moss-Bachrach: So that’s like…fuck. [Laughs]

Williams: It’s okay. I have to explain something to you, which is that when we make these things, there’s now all this technology—you can continue watching it for quite some time afterwards. Unless it gets taken off a platform unceremoniously someday. But for now, it’s still there.

Moss-Bachrach: I’m gonna watch it, but I think I’m gonna watch some Girls first.

Williams: Well, why not? As long as my face is part of it, obviously. Malignant narcissism.

Moss-Bachrach: You did…it was Peter Pan, right?

Williams: Mm-hmm.

Moss-Bachrach: And then was Perfection—

Williams: Get Out was before Perfection. [Get Out] was kind of because of Peter Pan. Jordan Peele was like, “She’ll do anything.” [Laughs]

Moss-Bachrach: Yeah, she’s crazy.

Williams: She just flew on live television, sword fighting Christopher Walken. She’s down. She will be the ultimate villain of this movie. And he was right, and I loved it. And o then from there, I just was trying to keep doing things that felt really interesting, and also kind of playing with what audiences were expecting from me after each choice…. Like, I knew that the first time people saw me after Get Out, they wouldn't trust me for a while again. So choosing movies and genres where I could play with that felt really, really fun.

Moss-Bachrach: So using expectations based on what you just did or what you have done, your body of work. I think that’s smart.

Williams: Well, it’s been really fun, and it’s kept me in the thriller-mix genre, which I never expected. And I can barely sit through a horror movie. I’m too scared. But it is really fun, and the characters are really interesting. And then I got to do a show like Fellow Travelers, which is totally outside of that genre and has historical fiction and drama. And that was a really fun challenge that felt also very different but rewarding in a very similar way.

I’d be very curious, based on anything you know about the show, to ask me a question blindly, knowing nothing more than you know.

Moss-Bachrach: All right. So is Matt Bomer really that handsome in real life?

Williams: So handsome it’s crazy. [Laughs] Great question. Great question.

Moss-Bachrach: Fellow Traveler…based on the play?

Williams: Based on a book…

Moss-Bachrach: Based on a book.

Williams: And then there was an opera, I think. And then a play. And now our show.

Moss-Bachrach: Okay. Tell me about that accent.

Williams: My accent? This is so funny. This is like Mad Libs in an interview [laughs]. By the way, it’s Fellow Travelers, plural. But we’ll get there. It was fine. We can ADR that.

Vanity Fair: Have you seen the Marnie and Desi Tortured Poets Department memes?

Williams: Have I ever! I’m an insane Swiftie. I’m so honored. I love the idea of Marnie and Desi being in the Tortured Poets Department where someone who won’t be named is running, dashing out with their typewriter.

Moss-Bachrach: [Looks confused]

Williams: Now I’m also referencing something—you’re just looking at me.

Moss-Bachrach: I’m listening and learning.

Williams: It’s the titular song off of the most recent Taylor Swift album. There were a lot of memes about us being the original, the tortured poets. It feels right. It feels canonically accurate.

Moss-Bachrach: That sounds right to me.

Williams: This man, who shall not be named, would’ve fit right in with our world and would’ve, I think, probably really livened up our music in a way. But also, you know, it feels right.