So, let’s talk about Arya and Gendry having sex. Yeah, it was bound to happen, I mean, you could almost cut the sexual tension between the two with a Valyrian steel knife. It all began with Arya prowling around a clueless Gendry in Game of Thrones Episode 801, “Winterfell,” and it continued in this week’s episode, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”
Funnily enough, it wasn’t Maisie Williams who first found out that scene was about to happen, as according to Entertainment Weekly, it was her best friend Sophie Turner (Sansa) that read through super fast and got to the sexytime scene first.
“I called Maisie and was like: ‘Have you read it yet?’” Turner said. “And she’s like, ‘I’m midway through episode one.’ And I’m like: This scene, this page, read it! This is awesome! She was very happy.”
Williams, who had yet to read page one of the season 8 scripts, quickly skipped ahead. “Sophie said, ‘Whatever you do, you have to skip to this episode, this scene first.’ So I just read that and it was practically all I knew about the entire season.” Well, that’s certainly one way to do it.
At first, Williams thought the scene between Arya and Gendry was a prank, but when she confronted showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, she quickly learned it was legit. “At first, I thought it was a prank,” she said. “I was like, ‘Yo, good one.’ And [the showrunners were] like, ‘No, we haven’t done that this year.’ Oh f—k!”
I got to the read-through and I’m reading the scene and thought, ‘Oh, we’re actually going to do this. When do I shoot this? I need to go to the gym.’ A whole list of things.
So, was that actually Willaims, or a body double doing the partially nude scene? We’ll let her explain that. “David and Dan were like: ‘You can show as much or as little as you want,’” she said. “So I kept myself pretty private. I don’t think it’s important for Arya to flash. This beat isn’t really about that. And everybody else has already done it on the show, so…”
Still, when it came time to undress, there was a bit of a learning curve to get through. “In the beginning, everyone was really respectful,” Williams said. “No one wants to make you feel uncomfortable which kind of makes you feel more uncomfortable, because no one wants to look at anything that they shouldn’t look at which in turn makes you feel like you look awful because everyone is kind of like—“ [Williams averts her eyes]. “You want people to act more normal.”
Then [the scene] was rushed. We were [directed by] David Nutter, who has a habit of speaking fast anyway. By the end we’re rushing to finish the scene and David is going, ‘Okay, you’re going to come in and do this and do that and, great, take your top off’ — and then walked off. And I’m like … ’Okay. Let’s do it.
Joe Dempsie (Gendry), who is ten years older than Williams, definitely felt awkward about the scene; he has known her since season 1, after all. “It’s obviously slightly strange for me because I’ve known Maisie since she was 11, 12 years old,” he said. “At the same time, I don’t want to be patronizing toward Maisie — she’s a 20-year-old woman. So we just had a lot of fun with it.” Well, at least they had fun.
Williams says Arya’s moment with Gendry was all about her getting in touch with her humanity, instead of another season of surviving and fighting and killing. “It was really interesting because it’s a very human relationship for Arya,” she said. “This is something she’s stayed away from, an emotion we’ve never really seen her engage with.
“David and Dan were like, ‘It’s the end of the world, what else would you have her do?’ This may be is a moment where Arya accepts death tomorrow, which she never does — ‘Not Today.’ So it was that moment where she says, ‘We’re probably going to die tomorrow, I want to know what this feels like before that happens.’ It’s interesting to see Arya be a bit more human, speak more normally about things people are scared of.”
Well, now that she’s been with Gendry, perhaps Arya will want to continue to say “Not Today” to death. Let’s hope she and her man both make it through the impending battle in Episode 803.
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