The Brutal Buzz by Indie: The Hard Truths Maisie Williams Learned While Growing Up On "Game Of Thrones"

Thursday, March 27, 2014

The Hard Truths Maisie Williams Learned While Growing Up On "Game Of Thrones"

The 16-year-old British actress talks about how she de-Arya Starks herself, the struggles she’s faced at school, and why she has a lot of admiration for Miley Cyrus.

Lucas Jackson / Reuters

Maisie Williams has been playing one of the youngest and certainly most audacious of the noble Stark offspring since George R.R. Martin's best-selling novels were translated to the screen with HBO's acclaimed Game of Thrones, which launched in 2011. The Bristol-born actress was just 12 years old when she first breathed life into the fearless tomboy character, a favorite of viewers and of readers of Martin's series. Now, she's a 16-year-old who loves manicures and Andrew Garfield and who's become quite courageous in her own right as well. Ask her a question and she responds with a wisdom far beyond her years and a directness that is refreshing in Hollywood.

"Someone once told me that if you respect a person, listen to their opinion. And if you do not respect someone, then do not listen to their opinion," she said of the biggest lesson she's learned over the course of the past four years. "And that works both ways."

The day after the Game of Thrones Season 4 premiere in New York in mid-March, Williams sat in a floral print tunic top in a suite at a posh Midtown hotel, looking incredibly petite on the room's massive, but pristine couch. "I stress out so much about the red carpet and interviews and pictures, and, you know, not getting my skirt tucked in my knickers," she said frankly of last night's event. "You worry about all of that and then, that's all over and all of sudden [the episode is] playing and you're like, 'No! Wait! Wait! Wait a second. I'm not ready.' It's crazy."

Thrones is HBO's biggest series since The Sopranos, and Williams is perhaps still getting used to being part of a phenomenon that spans the globe. After stepping out of Arya's very dirty shoes at the end of a season, the teenaged actress tries to dust the character off of her, despite the affinity she has for Arya. One of the first things she does is get a manicure and on this March day, she's sporting black polish with daisy and skull designs.

"I feel like I need to do something just to get back to normal life. And when we finish shooting, I do get a bit sad, so it's just something that makes you feel better about yourself," she said with a laugh. "If you've got cool nails, you wake up and you're like, Oh, I'm happy now. I'm so easy to please. It's just getting back into Maisie again. I have to do something to just be me again, whether that's — this is going to sound really fake but — getting my extensions in or getting my legs waxed, just something to bring me back into my world. Sometimes I get a spray tan at the end of it, just because then you snap out of that world."