Maisie Williams Hated Game Of Thrones For A Very Personal Reason
Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams resented the hit HBO show for a very personal and specific reason, she has revealed.
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British actor Maisie Williams was cast in the role of Arya Stark on HBO’s Game of Thrones at the age of 12. It was her first professional acting role, and suddenly being thrust into a central role in a series that defined an era of peak television was doubtlessly difficult on multiple levels. It is really not that surprising that Williams grew to resent the role over time and for a pretty obvious (in hindsight) reason. According to an interview the actor recently gave to GQ UK, she resented playing Arya because she went through fairly normal physical changes involved with puberty over the course of the eight seasons of the show, but the timeframe of the show did not really involve the same thing for the character of Arya. Here is how Maisie Williams put it:
I think that when I started becoming a woman, I resented Arya because I couldn’t express who I was becoming… And then I also resented my body, because it wasn’t aligned with the piece of me that the world celebrated.
Throughout the wide-ranging interview with GQ, Maisie Williams expresses appreciation for her time on Game of Thrones and the opportunities it presented. She does acknowledge that she felt compelled to make a number of physical changes (famously dying her hair carnation pink) and going against her public persona in an attempt to shed the idea of the eternally vengeful tomboy Arya Stark. During the many ears that Game of Thrones was on the air on HBO, Williams performed in a number of other productions, but nothing came close to the cultural ubiquity of the George R.R. Martin adaptation. She starred with Florence Pugh in the 2014 mystery The Falling, as well as the Irish comedy Gold. Williams also notably guest-starred in four episodes of the ninth series of Doctor Who, portraying an immortal Viking girl who encounters Peter Capaldi’s version of the Timelord.
Since Game of Thrones has been off the air, Maisie Williams has tried a number of roles. She performed in the voice cast of the science fiction web series gen:LOCK along with Dakota Fanning and Michael B. Jordan. Williams also appeared in the much delayed X-Men adjacent movie The New Mutants as Rahne Sinclair / Wolfsbane, along with Anya Taylor-Joy; the film became a notorious bomb, but Williams was one of the few spared critical drubbings. In 2020, Williams starred with Fleabag’s Sian Clifford in the Sky UK/HBO Max mini-series Two Weeks to Live, in which she plays a girl raised as an off-the-grid survivalist who comes to believe the world is ending as the result of a practical joke.
Currently, Maisie Williams is set to star in Academy Award-winning filmmaker Danny Boyle’s FX miniseries Pistol, about the formation of 1970s punk rock icons The Sex Pistols. Williams will play model Jordan (also known as Pamela Rooke), a model closely associated with Vivienne Westwood and the originator of many ubiquitous punk fashions. Although Williams said she was initially concerned about the nudity required for the role (as Jordan was notoriously unapologetic in her transgressive choice of clothing or lack thereof), the nature of the rebellious role apparently appealed to her. Pistol is set to premiere on the FX Network on May 22, 2022.
