Maisie Williams talks fashion, the pain of playing Arya Stark

Maisie Williams shot to fame as Arya Stark, the most murder-minded member of the wayward Stark family. But playing a revenge-driven girl when you’re going through puberty is tough, especially when your character is supposed to be passing for a boy as she makes her way across Westeros trying to reunite with her family.

Williams started work on Thrones when she was around 11 or 12, while she was still a kid. But as she explained to Vogue, things got tricky pretty quickly:

A couple of seasons in the middle, maybe around season 2 or 3, my body started to mature and I started to become a woman, but Arya was still very much trying to be disguised as a boy, and I had really short hair, and they’d constantly cover me in dirt and shade my nose so it looked really broad and I looked really manly. And they’d also put this strap across my chest to flatten any growth that had started. And that just felt horrible for six months of the year, and I felt a bit ashamed for a while.

You have to wonder if she ever took out her frustration in scenes like this:

These days, Williams has more options when deciding what to wear. “So with this new phase of my style, it is nice to look more feminine and have a real waistline and embrace the body that I have,” she said. She walks through her style in the video below, where Vogue followed her and her boyfriend Reuben Selby at Paris Fashion Week:

Let’s take a quick look at that journey. As Williams herself showed off above, here’s what she looked like on her first day on the Game of Thrones set:

Fast forward about a decade and…

The style! The grace! The eyeshadow!

Whether disguised as a boy on the run or stomping the runway, Williams looks the part.

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