Maisie Williams talks about returning to the Game of Thrones universe in the form of an Arya Stark spinoff series and how GoT has affected her.
Maisie Williams’ recent interview with GQ revealed much about how she felt growing up with Game of Thrones— how it affected people’s perception of her, her daily life, her past resentment towards it, and her thoughts on returning.
GQ’s Douglas Greenwood talks about his discussions with Game of Thrones casting director Robert Sterne.
“The casting director Robert Sterne still remembers Maisie’s first audition. “We had seen hundreds of young people for the part,” he tells me, “and then in walked Maisie being honest and brave and unfazed and direct and funny; asking interesting questions. I don’t know how she did it.” Her portrayal of the character of Arya, he says, seemed fully formed from the very beginning.”
Maisie talks about how GoT impacted her at a young age, and the first time she experienced LA’s red carpet, “I’m grateful we were protected from it until that point, too,” Williams says, scratching behind her ear. “If that had happened when I was 12, I’m not sure what that would have done to me mentally.”
Maisie also talked about how the growing separation between her identity and Arya Stark began to cause a riff between her and the character.
“Williams remembers the day she was handed a bra in the Game of Thrones costume trailer. It was a coming-of-age moment that, in the context of the show, marked the beginning of a distancing from, if not the fun of playing Arya Stark, then at least the way Williams identified with her. Up until the show’s final season, this image of a violent young girl – tomboyish, if old-fashioned, seems like an apt descriptor – was how she’d been seen by the world. “I think that when I started becoming a woman, I resented Arya because I couldn’t express who I was becoming,” she says. “And then I also resented my body, because it wasn’t aligned with the piece of me that the world celebrated.””
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When responding to a question about what she misses about her time on the show, Williams’ response was intriguing, “Can I say none of it?”
“I don’t think it’s healthy [to miss it], because I loved it,” she says. “I look at it so fondly, and I look at it with such pride. But why would I want to make myself feel sad about the greatest thing that ever happened to me? I don’t want to associate that with feelings of pain.”
Towards the end of the interview, Williams finally broached the topic of her thoughts on returning to the popular fantasy series.
“But would she do it again on screen? She grins at the question. “I’m not saying it would never happen, but I’m also not saying it in this interview so that everyone goes…” – she gasps, and slips into the skin of a GoT superfan: “‘The spin-off! It’s coming!’ Because it’s not. It has to be the right time and the right people,” Williams adds, her voice warm, and winking a little now. “It has to be right in the context of all the other spin-offs and the universe of Game of Thrones.” But most importantly: “It has to be the right time for me.””
