All About Thomas Kail, Michelle Williams’s Husband

THE RUNDOWN

• Michelle Williams and Thomas Kail first connected when they worked together on Fosse/Verdon.
• The couple got engaged in December 2019.
• They’ve since welcomed three children, with their third arriving via surrogate in April 2025.

Michelle Williams and her husband, director Thomas Kail, have quietly built their life together offscreen after meeting on the set of Fosse/Verdon. They married in 2020 and now have three children together. In early April 2025, People revealed they had welcomed their youngest child six weeks before via surrogate.

Here’s everything to know about Kail and his love story with Williams.

Kail is known for directing Broadway’s Hamilton. He won the 2016 Tony award for Best Direction of a Musical and later adapted the show into a filmed version for Disney+. He used a combination of live performance footage and carefully planned onstage camerawork. “I always wanted to capture what it felt like to be in the theater,” Kail said in a 2020 interview with Screen Rant. He added his goal was to give home viewers “the best seat in the house.”

Before Hamilton, Kail had already made a name for himself directing In the Heights, which earned him a Tony nomination in 2008. On television, he’s helmed Grease: Live!, which won two Emmys, and more recently We Were the Lucky Ones, a Hulu limited series about a Jewish family separated during the Holocaust. It premiered in spring 2024.

Kail is also set to direct Disney’s upcoming live-action adaptation of Moana, which will star Dwayne Johnson as Maui. The project is slated for a 2026 release.

Kail and Williams first connected on the 2019 FX limited series Fosse/Verdon. Williams starred as Gwen Verdon, while Kail directed five episodes and served as an executive producer.

When the couple’s relationship began has been kept private. According to People, Kail and Williams were previously married and began dating following their divorces in 2019. In December of that year, People reported that Williams and Kail were engaged and expecting their first child together.

In March 2020, they were photographed wearing wedding bands. That June, they welcomed their son, Hart. Since then, they’ve continued to expand their family. They had another child in 2022 and a third via surrogate in 2025. “It’s a busy house, but it’s a happy one,” Williams revealed to Entertainment Tonight in November 2022, following the birth of her third child and second child with Kail. (She had 19-year-old daughter Matilda with her late partner, Heath Ledger.)

On April 3, 2025, People reported the couple’s third baby was six weeks old.

Although Williams and Kail occasionally appear together on red carpets, they’ve largely stayed out of the spotlight.

In a March 2025 New York Magazine cover story, Williams made a rare personal remark about how her FX series Dying for Sex impacted her view on intimacy. She explained that she sees sex as “an answer to death because it’s the ultimate feeling before we’re left without any.” She then quipped, “I got to go home and see my husband!”

Kail graduated from Wesleyan University in 1999 with a degree in history. In a 2023 career conversation hosted by his alma mater, he reflected on his experiences, telling students, “I learned a lot from watching and absorbing…I was constantly asking people about their own stories, and there’s usually something along the way that you feel like you can pick up and put in your pocket and take with you.”

He credited his time at Wesleyan—especially in student theater—with giving him the space to practice and figure out his path. “I didn’t go to Wesleyan thinking that [acting] was going to be anything that had to do with my life,” he said, “and I feel like the most Wesleyan thing ever is to major in history and then work in theater.”

Williams’s performance in Fosse/Verdon won her the 2020 SAG award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Limited Series. In her acceptance speech, Williams gave her partner a shout-out, saying, “Tommy, like everything else in our life, I share this [award] with you.”

They confirmed the news of their third child’s birth in August 2025.

In August 2025, Williams confirmed she and Kail had welcomed their third baby via surrogate.

“I’ve got to give a big shout-out to Christine,” she said during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on August 18. “Because this last baby did not come through my body, but the miracle of our little girl is thanks to Christine.”

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She added that life with three kids under 5 has been full but rewarding: “It’s good. It’s just really busy and I’m trying to figure out the work-life balance. I hear that a lot of people are talking about self care, and I’m just wondering, ‘When?’ Because I’m the working mom, and I already have the guilt, and I don’t want to take more time away from them. But I understand that I need to fill up the tank.”

“I’ve been spending a lot of time at the social security offices,” she joked. “You get to wait for an hour in complete silence. I have it all figured out.”