PHILIP GALANES: So, you two don’t know each other?

CYNTHIA NIXON: We do not.

PG: There’s no HBO clubhouse?

CN: Well, we go to midnight meetings, but we don’t admit it.

ALLISON WILLIAMS: It’s a secret thing.

PG: I’m wondering, what made the two of you want to be actors so young? Escapism? Attention?

AW: I don’t know about you, but even before I knew what acting was, I told my parents I wanted to do what they did in “The Wizard of Oz,” where one person plays two people and can put on different costumes. That’s how I articulated it the first time. I was about 4. It was dress up.

CN: I started at 12. When I was growing up in New York, it was a golden age for child actors: Ally Sheedy and Justin Henry, Jodie Foster and Tatum O’Neal. Quinn Cummings from “The Goodbye Girl” and Ricky Schroder from “The Champ.” So it seemed possible, not some glassed-off world. My mother had been an actress and knew people in the business. It sounds funny now to say I started at 12, but —

AW: It could have been much earlier.

CN: Right. We were very conscious of not starting me too soon. And when I was 12, I did this film, “Little Darlings,” with Tatum O’Neal, who was my idol, and Kristy McNichol. We shot for 10 weeks in Georgia, and it was my first year at Hunter High School, which is a very hard school. And when I got home, my parents and I looked at each other and said, “We can never do that again.” After that, I was tyrannical about what jobs I would take and what they would have to give me. Like when I was cast in “Amadeus” with Milos Forman, which was shooting in Europe, I said, “I want to be in your film so much, but I have a request: If I don’t shoot for two days in a row, you have to send me home.” They agreed.