What’s next for Maisie Williams after Game of Thrones?
Child star Maisie Williams earned $200K-an-episode for Game of Thrones. Here she reveals the tech gamble she spent it on.
There’s a moment in every actor interview when you realise how thoroughly the person across the table diverges from the character through which you first made her acquaintance. With Maisie Williams, the actor who plays Game of Thrones’ baby-faced assassin, that moment lands early. Thankfully. Because although she has played a juvenile killer on Thrones for the past seven years — one who lulls herself to sleep by reciting, over and over again, the roster of enemies she plans to execute to avenge her family — Williams is, in fact, a freshly minted Londoner, with all the newcomer’s zeal that entails. She ticks off “music festivals, being with my friends, going to the park and playing with other people’s dogs” as a few of her favourite things.
Looking even tinier in person than on screen, Williams has a heart-shaped face, huge hazel eyes and impish eyebrows. She shares with her character Arya Stark a quickness of gesture and a certain free-form agility. The youngest of four siblings raised mainly by her mother after her parents’ divorce, Williams spent her childhood in Bristol “climbing trees and running around, being very hyper, and dancing”. Acting wasn’t high on her agenda, until she was sent to an audition for Thrones. She remembers “meeting lots of really scary girls and really scary mums”, but also falling in friend-love-at-first-sight with Sophie Turner, who would go on to be cast as Arya’s sister, Sansa. “She was just the nicest girl ever. To find out we were going to be shooting together put me at ease, just knowing I already had a friend.” (They’re just as close off set — the date hasn’t been decided but Williams has been asked to be Turner’s bridesmaid at her wedding to American singer Joe Jonas.)
At the time, no one knew what to expect of Thrones — shows based on fantasy-book series featuring incest and dragons are not usually big hits on TV. Filming wrenched Williams out of her pre-teen routine of school, friends and dance classes, and changed her family life too: her mother left her job as a university course administrator to become the then 12-year-old Williams’ personal assistant and chaperone. “I had a tough time at school and was asked to leave because of my attendance. Lots of people had not-very-nice things to say about me, and no one here had really heard of the show,” she says. Then she went on her first press tour and was confronted by “hundreds, maybe thousands” of fans at every turn, first in Los Angeles, then San Francisco, New York, Boston and so on. “It was a moment when my mum and I realised how big the show was and that this was my career now, and I was like, ‘We made the right choice. It’s all going to work out; it’s going to be OK.’”
It’s only grown bigger. During the show’s seventh season, which culminated in a dragon-assisted battle royal last August, Thrones averaged 31 million viewers per episode worldwide. It’s the most-awarded drama series in the history of the Emmys and surpassed The Sopranos as home network HBO’s most-watched series in 2015. And it’s estimated that each episode of the eighth and final series will cost $20 million to produce.
Williams says viewers have rooted for Arya since the beginning because “it was really refreshing to see a young girl who was so feisty and confident”. In the seasons since, Arya’s initial fresh-faced excitement about learning swordsmanship has been hardened by brutal plot twists (including witnessing her father’s execution) and a stint training with the Faceless Men of Braavos — training that saw Arya temporarily blinded, beaten and abused in and around the temple of the Many-Faced God. She’s cut her share of throats and fed at least one of her enemies a pie made of his sons’ flesh. And for a few episodes last season, it looked like she might direct her rage toward her sister. “That was good fun — to feel like an enemy, like a bad guy,” Williams says. “Often you’re cheering for her because she’s about to kill someone everyone hates, but when you see her do that with a character everyone loves, to see her so furious at her sister, it’s really, really powerful. She’s one step away from spinning out of control.”
Growing up as Arya has presented Williams with a different set of milestones. Williams’ and Turner’s mothers stopped shielding them from the show’s graphic sex and violence early on, when they debated taking the girls out of a read-through of a scene featuring two girls “going at it” — trying to keep their daughters in the dark only served to pique their interest. “The sex was just quite embarrassing and awkward for us,” Williams says, matter-of-factly. “Most of the gory stuff I was part of, and it’s not scary when you’re there shooting it. No one’s really getting their face ripped off. So it’s quite exciting really.” She’s watched many episodes on the sofa next to her grandmother. “Bless her, my mum just plies her with more and more gin.”
The show has faced criticism for its violence and misogyny, which Williams dismisses. “I’ve never, ever felt like this is a misogynistic show. The best and most powerful characters are all women … I’ve only ever been inspired by the women, and how they gain power and control and take their destinies into their own hands.” As one of the last women still standing in season eight, which has finished filming in Belfast, Williams is aware that the world will be watching Arya’s every move. Yes, she knows how it all ends. No, she’s not saying. “I think people are gonna like it,” she says, smiling in a wolfish, Arya-like way.
Williams thinks she’s ready for the end of Thrones. She’s taken care to pursue other roles. Most recently, she appeared in Mary Shelley, Saudi Arabian director Haifaa al-Mansour’s romantic period drama about the Frankenstein author, as a Scottish confidante of Elle Fanning’s Shelley. She’d like to direct, but her first post-Thrones project is in the tech sphere. It’s Daisie, a social-networking app for young “creators” — defined as “filmmakers, writers, readers, listeners and speakers, poets, dancers, singers, chefs, entrepreneurs, developers and architects” — that rewards members who build links (“chains”) rather than high follower counts. “I’m getting to the point where I wanted to invest my money” — she has an estimated net worth of $8 million and is said to earn $200,000 per episode of Thrones — “and why not go into tech? I believe in this. We’ve got something really special that will benefit a lot of people my age.”
Much like Turner and Emilia Clarke, who plays dragon-riding khaleesi (queen) Daenerys Targaryen, Williams has received her share of attention from the fashion industry. US brand Coach enlisted her as a “friend”, meaning she gets to wear its clothes to high-profile events. She still finds fashion “quite scary” but has cultivated a quirky, youthful style that ensures she stands out, whether at Thrones promotional appearances or fashion awards. “I’ve always wanted to be age-appropriate,” she says. “I look at other 21-year-olds, like [model] Bella Hadid and [singer] Camila Cabello, and I don’t feel I’m a woman like that” — meaning, it seems, one who comes across as being in full and frank command of her sexual powers. “They’re amazing but that’s not who I am.” She loves wearing bandannas and things that “work for me and me only, something that’s my own stamp”.
Recently, rather than buying a dress she would wear once for a wedding (of Thrones co-stars Kit Harington and Rose Leslie), she treated herself to a Dries Van Noten trouser ensemble. It’s just one of the outfits she Snapchats on her private account, though she also fills her rare free time with cooking, pranking her flatmate with fake blood nicked from the Thrones prop department, watching The Bachelor and practising yoga, which puts her in a reflective frame of mind. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about before the show and how normal it was, and how I’m going to have a normal — well, maybe not completely normal — but I’m going to have a life after the show,” she says.
The constant is family: one brother is travelling around the world; the other is on an extended trip to the US; her older sister is the mother of a toddler. She says they all consider Bristol their base and try to see each other as often as possible. As for her now-remarried mum, they remain close, and she is the only person with whom Williams has shared scripts for the final episodes. “I look back to the harder times we had and how much my mum struggled being a single mother with four kids — just thinking about how different my life could have been, and how lucky I am in that I’ve been able to provide for my family … It’s an amazing thing.”
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