Maisie Williams has opened up about the ‘really hard’ obstacle she faced in her career after shooting to fame in Game of Thrones.
The actress was plucked from obscurity aged 12 to score her first professional acting role as Arya Stark in the HBO fantasy drama, which aired from 2011 until 2019.
In the five years since the George RR Martin adaptation ended, Maisie, now 26, has notched up credits in film and TV, including the Sex Pistols biopic Pistol and the comedy action drama series Two Weeks to Live.
In her latest role in Apple TV series The New Look, Maisie plays Catherine Dior, the sister of legendary fashion designer Christian Dior, and recently revealed the shocking method she undertook to look ‘emaciated’ for the role, which has received heavy criticism.
However, Maisie has now said she has found it ‘really hard’ to secure roles ‘that are in a world like The New Look because of the Arya Stark character,’ revealing the surprising pitfall of her Game of Thrones fame.
Speaking about her casting in The New Look, she continued to The Times: ‘But the most amazing thing was that Todd [Kessler, The New Look’s creator] had never seen a single episode [of GoT], so he just got to meet me as a 24-year-old woman and see a character like Catherine within me without having this tarnished view of me being kind of a scruffy boy.’
Maisie also told the publication the vertical ascent to superstardom, acting in one of the most popular TV shows ever made, and growing up in the public eye made her lose her identity.
She explained: ‘I was so lost for so long and I knew that I was, and when I couldn’t pin down what I felt my identity was within that, it brought me a lot of discomfort.
‘Now I feel a lot more comfortable in my own skin. It’s hard to even put myself back there and talk about how tough it was just because I think it’s done.’
Maisie previously said she ‘resented’ playing Arya while going through puberty in an interview with British GQ Style’s Spring Summer 2022 issue.
‘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 I wasn’t aligned with the piece of me that the world celebrated,’ she revealed.
Meanwhile, The New Look explores the rise to fortune of Catherine’s brother Christian and the fashion designer Coco Chanel; played by Ben Mendelsohn and Juliette Binoche respectively.
Speaking about the extreme lengths she undertook to become Catherine, which received widespread backlash, Maisie previously told Harper’s Bazaar: ‘I was eating very little, meditating all the time, burning candles and incense in my apartment.
‘I had to be up at 4am to start sweating. The night before, at about 7 or 8pm I was allowed to have something salty and dehydrating – some smoked salmon and a tiny glass of wine.’
Maisie continued: ‘Then I had a boiling-hot bath with lots of salts in it. And I sort of levitated to bed and slept for maybe three hours, and woke up and had a handful of nuts. I wouldn’t be able to sleep through the night at this point. I kept waking up and feeling like a marble inside a bottle, rattling around…’
Such an ordeal led to intense nightmares after the hard days on set, which Maisie described as ‘a lot of feeling restricted, almost like sleep paralysis, dreams of being trapped and attacked, and horrible visions of men in uniform.’
However, to the star, it was important the show highlighted the uplifting side of Catherine’s story.
Maisie said: ‘Every day of filming was a reminder that we were portraying a story of the horrors that humans are capable of inflicting on one another, but also the magic and the hope and the love…’
‘Ultimately, we wanted to make a show that was uplifting,’ she concluded.
Game of Thrones is available to stream on Now in the UK.
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