Maisie Williams has opened up about her ‘traumatic’ relationship with her father, revealing the ‘pain, dread, and fear’ that characterised her early childhood.
The actress, best known for her role as Arya Stark on Game Of Thrones, explained that her mother ‘escaped’ her father when she was just four months old.
‘I had quite a traumatic relationship with my dad,’ she began. ‘That really consumed a lot of my childhood.’
She added to Stephen Bartlett on the Diary of A CEO podcast: ‘I think a lot of the traumatic things that were happening, I didn’t realise they were wrong. But I knew – I would look around at other kids and be like, “Why don’t they seem to understand this pain, or dread, or fear? Where does the joy – when does that come for me?”
‘I’ve kind of always felt like I felt things very deeply in comparison to other people and so when that period of my life ended, I imagined that everything is just up from here, everything’s perfect now.
‘All those things I was concerned about were actually wrong and now, I’m sort of free. And then at different stages in life, you realise there’s never an end destination for that freedom, and that it kind of comes from within.’
Maisie went on to say of her role as Arya, an impulsive and fearless character: ‘I’ve known how that feels and its hugely influenced, I get to access all of that confusion and pain in my job, and really feel it in every fibre of my being… it’s all pretend but the emotion is real…it all just came to the surface.’
While it’s the first time the actress has spoken about her early childhood at length, she has previously been open about her mental health.
Talking to Fearne Cotton on the Happy Place podcast in 2019, she spoke about depression, saying: ‘It’s terrifying to consider you could slip back into it.
‘I’m really working on that right now because it’s hard to deal with. It’s hard to allow yourself to feel sad and not feel completely defeated by sadness.’
Maisie grew up in Somerset, and was raised by her mother Hilary, along with her three siblings, James, Beth and Ted.
At the age of 12, she was cast in Game Of Thrones, the TV adaptation of George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.
Of course, it became wildly successful, spawning eight series and House of the Dragon, the first of what could be many spin-off series.
Maisie starred as Arya at a very young age, thrust into the public eye at a difficult time, yet, she and the show’s other younger cast members were ‘protected’ from the public.
Speaking in British GQ Style’s Spring Summer 2022 issue, the actress admitted feeling ‘grateful’ that they were protected, revealing that if she had been thrust into the limelight at a younger age she’d be ‘[un]sure what would have happened to me mentally’.
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