'Game of Thrones' star Maisie Williams is all grown up, deadly with a sword and sharp as a tack
She’s gone from a bubbly little girl to a badass — right before our eyes.
Macall B. Polay/courtesy of HBO
Blinded but deadly - Maisie Williams as Arya Stark in season six "Game of Thrones."
Maisie Williams was just 12-years-old when she started playing Arya Stark, the youngest sibling in one of “Game of Thrones” most noble — but now shattered families.
Now, 18, the pint-sized powerhouse among the most formidable characters on the show, despite her small physical size -- and the fact that she's a girl.
It's something that's not lost on Williams, and neither is the fact that many of the most deadly characters on “GoT” are women.
“I think it’s amazing to part of a show that’s so original in that sense,” Williams tells us of her role on the HBO hit.
“It’s such a new thing in fantasy on television and film,” she says. “Until now women in fantasy have not been portrayed very well at all.”
Williams says that she never realized, “how lucky I was when I first got the part, I didn’t realize that it’s not very often that you come across characters like this and the more I learned, the more I learned how ground breaking Arya is in that sense — to be such a young girl but to be so fully formed.
“She’s such an honest woman, such an honest person and I think that’s really cool. I’m so grateful for how this all turned out — so far.”
Williams’ comments come in the wake of withering criticism last season after some of “GoT” show’s most notable female characters suffered horrible — Arya’s older sister, Sansa Stark was brutally raped, the scheming queen Cereci was “shamed” as she was forced to walk naked through the capital city as people hurled garbage at her and a tiny, child princess Shireen, was burned alive as her parents looked on.
But Williams believes the horror -- which will start to unfold again when the new season debuts on April 24 - is evenly spread between characters, both male and female.
“A lot of the men have it hard too,” she says. “Obviously the themes on the show are very dark, but they always have been. I get it that people don’t want to watch some of the more disturbing scenes, but that’s the show that we’ve made, and I have no control over what’s written.”