With the final season of Game of Thrones still far away, there have been so many questions, theories, spoilers, whispers about the end-game that we as the audience might be as exhausted as the cast. Just give us the script, we’ll read it. With the biggest show ever, the speculations are huge too, and the social media just amps it up. It makes one wonder, Were the simpler times of no-internet better? But after all the cribbing about how hard it is to wait or stay away from spoiler theories, we need to get back to what we constantly seek, Game of Thronescast talking Game of Thrones.
Maisie Williams, who playsArya Stark of Winterfell, recently talked toThe Guardian about her final scene on Game of Thrones, her stage debut, experience with her peers as a ‘successful’ teenager, and the road ahead.
Williams wrapped her filming on the final season in July. When asked about how close she is to the show at the moment, she showed off her hand, “I’ve had my fingernails painted for three weeks,” she laughed. “That’s how far out of the show I am. It really feels like a long time ago.”
According to her, some cast members are still mourning the loss ofGame of Thrones in their lives, but she feels at peace with leaving Arya behind. She explains,“I got to the end and I didn’t want more. I had exhausted every possible piece of Arya. And this season was quite big for me. I had a lot more to do. Mainly because there’s just lesscharacters now, so everyone’s got more to do.”
Talking about her final scene though, she described, “It was beautiful. I ended on the perfect scene. I was alone- shocker! Arya’s always bloody alone. But I was alone and I had watched a lot of other people wrap. I knew the drill, I had seen the tears and heard the speeches.” And her own speech?“It wasn’t something I planned. But in that moment, I realized what the show meant to me.” Later, she says, they went for a fancy meal, “And drank a lot of sake.”
Maisie had teased something similar in her Instagram post in July, prompting fan frenzy questions- Is she the last person/woman alive on the show? or Does she win the Game of Thrones? We will have to wait till Game of Thrones’ final season premieres (or leaks), to know the answers.
She makes her stage debut with I And You, a play written by Lauren Gunderson-who became the most produced playwright (after Shakespeare) in America last year. Here, she plays Caroline, a 17-year-old who’s housebound due to illness until classmate Anthony bursts in uninvited. “Caroline has a very quick wit and an almost pessimistic view of the world, which she’s built from experience, and has all the facts to back it up.” The 21-year-old actor found the script quite relatable.“Reading the script was like reading texts on my phone from when I was at school. What’s exciting about it is how much it resonated with me as a young human in the world today.”
Williams had to leave school when filming for Game of Thrones started. And after the first two seasons, she went back to school, but it was a difficult, upsetting experience. Eventually, she was taught at home. She said, “When you’re 15, 16, that’s when the hormones are really flying. Going through that and trying to juggle other people’s opinions on who you are and how you should act, that’s difficult, just because you’re desperately trying to find your own identity. Whether you’re famous at 15 or not, you’re still confused as to who you are. I went through a really dark phase of just thinking everything was awful.”
However, while seeing Caroline’s worldview, she’s had help with these troubled memories at hand. “It is a very honest teenage mindset of, ‘Bad things happen to me, so the world is bad.’ Those are your first steps into the big wide world.”
She admits of still being petrified of her peers because she just didn’t spend enough time with them. But at some level, she empathizes with them now,“I don’t want to excuse anyone’s behavior. But being 15 and feeling threatened by someone who’s successful, that seems like quite a human thing. When I look back, I just think it could have literally been anyone. It just so happened that I was the one who got the success.”
Walking away from the dust and smoke of a show that shaped her growing-up, she has The New Mutants, a horror film based on the Marvel Comics‘ team of the same name, due in August 2019. In this, she plays Wolfsbane, a young girl with lupine (wolf-related) powers. There’s another film about rival speakeasies in World War II-era Malta. And there’s constant attention on Daisie, a networking app for creators’ collaboration around the globe in film, fashion, music, photography, art, and literature, that she co-founded with Dom Santry.
It seems she’s pretty busy after all. She had a smile for that, “It’s a nine to five job, which is the routine I need. I can’t live this crazy, sporadic life.”
What did you think about Maisie’s interview? Talk to us in the comments.
