THRONE OF SILENCE
Arya’s keeping plot secrets
Arya Stark was no coddled child.
Born with a fiercely independent spirit, she spent her teens on Game of Thrones braving hardship, loneliness and combat. Physically small but handy with a sword, Arya’s creed seemed to be “You go, girl!”
Her latest challenge, imposed at the end of last season (spoiler alert!): She was struck blind as punishment for going rogue with a personal hit list.
Among the legions of characters on Game of Thrones, Arya has remained one of its most popular throughout the first five seasons of this epic fantasy set in the makebelieve continent of Westeros.
Now, as Season 6 nears (Sunday on HBO), GoT devotees are ravenous for any advance intel on the show and its stars — who include Peter Dinklage, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Lena Headey, Emilia Clarke, Aiden Gillen and Sophie Turner as well as Maisie Williams, now 19. Williams has invested Arya with her feisty charm since she was 12.
So far, no beans have been spilled by any GoT insiders — though producers revealed months ago that this season, the plot will veer away from the George R.R. Martin books on which the show is based. And rest assured, if you bother to press Williams on how Arya is dealing with sightlessness, she will say, in the nicest way possible, don’t waste MY time or YOURS.
Arya was the British-born Williams’ first acting job, landed after an open casting call — a splashy way to enter the profession.
“I didn’t know much about television or HBO,” she says. “The reason it was so exciting was not because I thought, ‘Oh, this could be a really big TV show.’ It was more like, ‘Oh, look! Maisie got cast in SOMETHING!’ ”
Her current off-screen role includes keeping all those GoT secrets. For instance: Even after seeing Jon Snow’s apparent death on last season’s finale, GoT fans have been dying to know whether Jon (Arya’s older brother, portrayed by Kit Harington) is really finished — or if that scene might have been a bit of narrative sleight-of-hand.
“People feel like they want to know what’s going to happen, but they don’t really want to know. They wouldn’t want it spoiled for them. So it doesn’t feel like I’m keeping a deep, dark secret. It feels like, ‘Just wait! It’s going to be so much better with you sitting down and watching it, than with me ruining it for you by explaining it now,’ ” she says.