#Why Busy Phillips Encouraged Michelle Williams to Narrate Britney Spears’ Audiobook

Busy Philipps stopped by Watch What Happens Live on Tuesday to promote Mean Girls and the conversation briefly turned to … Britney Spears.

A fan asked via video, “What was your reaction when your bestie Michelle Williams told you she would be the narrator for Britney Spears’ memoir, and were you surprised at how viral her performance was?”

Phillipps started off by saying she’s been asked this on the red carpet and has turned the conversations back to Mean Girls, but she’d indulge this time because it was coming from a fan.

“We lost it,” Philipps remembers of Williams telling her about the opportunity. “She was like, ‘I have to do this, right? And I was like, ‘Yes!’”

There was a natural connection, as both became famous as teens around the same time. Dawson’s Creek, which propelled Williams into the spotlight, premiered the same year as Spears’ debut single, “Baby One More Time.” Philipps’ series Freaks and Geeks started not long after.

The friendship between Philipps and Williams, which was forged on the set of Dawson’s Creek, has sparked no shortage of online roundups with sites highlighting their history as “BFFs” as the duo have appeared on red carpets together supporting each other’s work.

“[Michelle] really felt a connection,” Philipps recalls. “We all came up in a very particular time in this industry — that was what the majority of my memoir [This Will Only Hurt a Little] is about — as young women and we were subjected to a lot. I think that there was a lot that was really, sadly, very relatable to all women in Britney’s book, but I thought that Michelle doing it was just incredible and really beautiful. Britney deserves our respect.”