GoT warrior not so fearless after all
She’s currently voicing a friendly character in Aardman Animation’s latest movie, but the Game of Thrones’ most feared warrior reveals there are a few things she’s scared of, finds Jane Cornwell.
Maisie Williams would love to face her fear and visit Australasia one day, as soon as she can find time in her super-busy schedule. It’s not the flying she’s worried about, or the sun on her fair English skin, or even any lukewarm reception – for what
Game of Thrones fan doesn’t adore the hit series’ bad-a.. tomboy, Arya Stark? As phobias go, her hangup is pretty garden-variety: spiders.
‘‘There are spiders in your capital cities too, right? Like, giant huntsmen? My friend told me they just appear on your bedroom wall out of nowhere,’’ declares the 20-year-old actress. ‘‘I’m hugely arachnophobic.’’ She flashes a grin. ‘‘Maybe I’ll stay in the water.’’
Discovering that Williams is as squeamish as the rest of us can feel a little disconcerting. After all, this is a woman known for playing characters as fearless and feisty as they are complex and multilayered.
There was the unhinged Lydia in 2014’s school set mystery The Falling; the witty but vulnerable Casey in Cyberbully, a 2015 television docudrama exploring the dark side of social media; and homeless teenager Millie, building a raft to sail across the Atlantic in 2016’s whimsical New Orleans-set drama, The Book of Love.
And, of course, there’s Arya, the teenage warrior she has played since the age of 12, growing into the part and celebrity as Game of
Thrones – now seven series in – became the world’s most-popular television show.
None of which is why she is here today, dressed in a black Miu Miu mini-dress with a white Peter Pan collar, her toned bare legs a legacy of her intensive dance background.
In her latest project, a stopmotion prehistoric comedy called
Early Man, she adopts a Scandinavian accent to play Goona, a sparky cavegirl who befriends the film’s hero, Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne), and helps him to negotiate a series of warring, goofy gangs from Stone and Bronze Age civilisations.
‘‘It was a challenge for me as an actor to only use my voice,’’ she says of the film directed by Nick Park and created by the Oscarwinning Aardman Animations, of
Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit fame.
Her collaboration with Aardman was all the more exciting because Williams grew up in Bristol, the city in southwest England where the company is based. To be working in the studio that assumed mythical status in her childhood was as electrifying for her as any of Ayra’s vengeancefuelled antics.
Two other new films underline her remarkable versatility as an actor: Departures, in which she plays Skye, a British teenager with a terminal illness and a bucket list. She is also as appearing as Wolfsbane in the much-anticipated X-Men spin-off horror flick, The
New Mutants, about a bunch of teens with superpowers.
Williams never set out to be an actor. The youngest of four children (she also has two halfsiblings), Margaret ‘‘Maisie’’ Williams was raised by her mother, a former university administrator, and her stepfather, a business consultant, in a middleclass home full of rough-andtumble and healthy competition.
She says she was always making her family laugh by doing funny accents and ‘‘generally mucking about’’. Cocky and charismatic and a bit small for her age, Williams was doing courses in ballet and modern dance when she was spotted by an agent and auditioned, unsuccessfully, for 2010’s Nanny McPhee sequel.
Her next try-out pitched her against hundreds of other hopefuls vying for the role of Arya Stark in HBO’s glossy adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s multi-volume saga,
A Song of Ice and Fire. She got the part, despite never having taken an acting lesson. Sensing that her daughter was on the cusp of something big, her mother gave Williams, then 14, permission to quit full-time mainstream education to be schooled by a tutor, a decision that provoked controversy in the British press.
Arya’s mission to avenge her parents’ murder, often passing as a boy, remains one of Game of
Thrones‘ most riveting storylines and Williams became a sort of feminist It Girl. Asked if she thinks the selfie generation has become too solipsistic, less engaged with the world at large, her brown eyes flash.
‘‘It’s such a short-cut to slam the younger generation for taking too many selfies. Okay, we’re selfobsessed, and that’s what the internet has brought, but we’re also very connected. If it was down to us, Hillary [Clinton] would have got in and Brexit would not have happened.’’
Williams never set out to be a spokesperson for youth, either, but she’s not shy of using social media to make a point, though she keeps her private life private as much as she can.
Her boyfriend, Ollie Jackson, isn’t quite so circumspect. Jackson (who she calls ‘‘OJ’’) is fond of posting wittily captioned pictures of the couple in various international locales. A photo of them posing on a staircase, titled ‘‘Dem Pins’’, draws attention to her fabulous legs.
‘‘Haha, that’s just my boyfriend,’’ says Williams. She stretches her legs out in front of her, flexing her platform heels.
‘‘I actually get trolled all the time for my legs. I don’t know if they’re great or really manly.’’
Williams has had to cultivate a thick skin to deal with internet trolls. During interviews in 2015 to publicise Cyberbully, she spoke of sitting on a train with her mother and scrolling through abuse on her phone about her portrayal of Ayra Stark. It was nasty, she said, but also something she could draw on for the role.
‘‘Just because you’re an actress and you’re famous doesn’t mean you have less insecurities,’’ she says.
‘‘People look at your job and your life and think, ‘How can you ever be unhappy?’ But of course there are times when things really get to you.’’
That doesn’t mean she’s going to tailor her opinions and play at being ‘‘nice’’, nor will she stop championing the importance of feminism and checking her white privilege.
‘‘Being a feminist is just about equal rights,’’ she says. ‘‘In this world, you’re a normal person if you believe in equal rights between the sexes, the sexualities, the races, for trans people, between everybody.’’
Authenticity is important to Williams, who has co-founded a production company, Daisy Chain, with the aim of making gritty works. One is Stealing Silver ,a short film about a troubled young woman (Williams) forced to deal with a mysterious neighbour.
Since she returned to London after filming The New Mutants, she’s been hanging out with her ‘‘normal’’ friends, who help keep her grounded.
At some point this year she’ll make time for a holiday, maybe visiting her boyfriend’s relatives in New Zealand and possibly, Australia.
‘‘I’ll just have to handle the spiders,’’ she says. You’ll be in the water anyway, I say.
‘‘But the sharks!’’ she exclaims, throwing up her hands in mock horror. – Sydney Morning Herald
"Just because you’re an actress and you’re famous doesn’t mean you have fewer insecurities."
Maisie Williams
❚ Early Man (PG) opens in New Zealand cinemas tomorrow.