Game of Thrones stars Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) and Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) recently sat down with Rolling Stone to talk things all things Game of Thrones, and perhaps spill a bean or two about what’s coming in season 8. These two actors have been soul sisters ever since they first met at a Thrones chemistry reading in 2009. “We were pretty much best friends from that second on,” Williams said. When you get them together it’s always fun, so let’s get to it.
When they realized the first (unaired) Thrones pilot was a stinker, Williams and Turner were distraught, fearful that their chance to work together would evaporate if the show failed at the starting gate. Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss recalled the girls’ unhappiness at the first wrap party. “We remember the both of them bawling and hugging each other, because they loved each other so much after only a few short weeks, and were afraid they’d never see each other again, because the show wouldn’t get picked up.”
After Ned Stark’s death near the end of season 1, the Stark sisters were separated; the characters wouldn’t share another scene together until season 7. According to Turner, that was all for the best. “We’re a nightmare to work with. If you’re working with your best friend, you will never get any work done, ever. Anytime we tried to be serious about anything, it’s just the hardest thing in the world. I think they really regretted putting us in scenes together. It was difficult.”
Williams is a very extroverted person, the opposite of her cool and collected Thrones character. “Arya is very calculated in the way that she conducts herself,” Williams said. “She doesn’t like people to know what she’s thinking.” Although plenty of them find out after Arya kills them. Willams always relished that part of her job:
You can feel the adrenaline. It feels incredible because it’s all pretend, it doesn’t matter. But when else do you get to do that? There was this shot we did at the end of Season Three when I’m stabbing the guy in the neck. They got me a sandbag and a fake knife, and they had blood going, and they were just like, ‘Stab! Just go for it.’ My God! You can feel ‘Ahhhh!’ It was good.
While shooting season 8, Williams found herself in an emotional wasteland, unable to cry onscreen or in private, essentially divorced from her emotions. “It was really amazing, perfect timing because Arya’s just starting to feel again for the first time,” she said. “So it was actually kinda beautiful the way it was working. Because usually I’m trying to play Arya with no emotion, whilst feeling everything. And this time I was feeling nothing while I was trying to feel something, and it worked . . . I think.”
Turner, meanwhile, describes herself as a “very emotional person,” which made it easy to emphasize with what Sansa was going through. She’d lie awake nights and “cry for my character” as Sansa was put through the ringer. “The things that girl has gone through are just unbelievable and awful.” The low point for Sansa was when she forced into a marriage with the abusive Ramsay Bolton, who raped her on their wedding night. That inspired a heated backlash among fans who thought the character was being mistreated, but Turner stands by the scene. “I think the backlash was wrong because those things did happen,” she said. “We can’t dismiss that and not put it in a TV show where it’s all about power — and that is a very impactful way to show that you have power over somebody.”
Turner also reminds us that Sansa’s rape wasn’t the end of that story, and that by the end of season 6 she was “empowered” and feeding Ramsay to his own dogs. “[The conclusion] made it a really great storyline,” she said. “Killing him with the dogs, that was the most satisfying scene. It made me so emotional because I’ve been waiting so long for her to stand up to the people who have done her wrong.”
And it did take a while before Sansa was in a position to do something about the parade of people who had hurt her. In the beginning, Turner says she was “jealous” of Williams for getting to do that sort of fun stuff. “[B]ecause [Arya] got to do all these sword fights and be the badass. I was like, ‘I know my character is very powerful.’”
Sansa adapts better than Arya. If Arya was in Sansa’s situation at the beginning, she would have had her head cut off. And if Sansa had been in Arya’s position, Sansa would have been bullied to death. . . . It was really frustrating how slow it was, but it just makes it all the more satisfying. I’m happy she’s only just coming into her power now.
Beyond Thrones, both Williams and Turner are young actors working in Hollywood, which Turner has learned is not entirely unlike Westeros. “There’s a lot of Sansa in me,” she said. “You go into something and you think it’s going to be a huge dream, and then you figure out, ‘Oh, wait. I have to be very strategic about everything. And Harvey Weinstein is Joffrey or Ramsay. Probably worse than that. A White Walker.’”
Though she never crossed paths with Weinstein, Turner did work on the last couple X-Men movies with Bryan Singer, who is currently facing allegations that he sexually assaulted underage boys. Actor Rami Malek recently talked about the rough time he had working with Singer on the set of Bohemian Rhapsody, she Turner is right there with him. “Our time together was, like Rami said, unpleasant.”
Coincidentally enough, Williams also played an X-Man in New Mutants, a horror take on the franchise that has been stuck in limbo for a while now. “Who knows when the fuck that’s gonna come out,” she said. “Hopefully this interview will make everyone hurry up a little bit!” If that happens, it’s possible Williams and Turner could reunite on screen, not as Arya and Sansa but as Wolfsbane and Jean Grey. “It would be ridiculously stupid if they didn’t do that.”
But let’s get back to Game of Thrones and talk slightly happier topics: the last day these two actors spent shooting Game of Thrones. “I went back into my trailer after we wrapped,” Williams remembered. “I took a shower, ’cause I was dirty. Arya is always dirty.” Once the dirt was washed off, she went outside to “really glorious sunshine, the nicest day,” got a beer from the assistant directors’ trailer and realized, “This is a wrap on Game of Thrones.”
I didn’t go out that night, because I didn’t want to say goodbye to everyone again. You can’t be like ‘Goodbye forever’ to this show. You can’t put that weight on any day. It’s like a divorce. It takes a very long time.
For her part, Turner wept, “because I cry at everything.” Benioff and Weiss gifted her a storyboard of their favorite Sansa scene, which just happens to be Sansa’s final scene of the entire series. Does this mean that Turner’s last moments as Sansa Stark are gonna be insanely powerful? We can’t wait.
“I feel very satisfied with the ending of the entire show,” Turner said. “Every story arc came to a really good close.” Williams big hint is that season 8 and season 1 have “a lot of similarities.” Oh, god, who’s gonna get beheaded at the end?
To feed the speculation bonfire, Benioff and Weiss bring up two other series finales they think are particularly powerful:
Breaking Bad stuck the landing. We always talk about the Sopranos ending — as controversial as it may have been at the time, it’s hard to imagine a better ending for that show, or any show.
Game of Thrones cuts to black over a version of “Don’t Stop Believing” played on the lute? Say it ain’t so!
Turner gets the last word. “[S]ansa, this whole show, the only reason she has willed herself to survive is for her family. The power of family and unity is so strong that it can keep people alive. That’s the biggest thing I’ve taken away from the show: Family is everything. I think Papa Stark would be very proud of us.”
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