Maisie Williams: “There’s something beautiful about fashion - you can be whoever you want to be.” Photo / AP
She shot to fame at 12 as Arya Stark, but life after Westeros was tough. Her role in series The New Look about Dior and Chanel is a fresh start.
Maisie Williams looks every inch a 1940s starlet: lace gloves, pillbox hat and skirt suit, with a cinched-in waist. Cat-eyed shades complete her outfit, but she removes them. “I wouldn’t sit on Zoom with you with sunglasses on because that’d be kind of annoying.” Still, we’re a long way from Westeros.
The actress, who found global fame aged 12 as the pint-size assassin Arya Stark in Game of Thrones, is now playing Catherine Dior, the sister of the fashion designer and a member of the French resistance, in The New Look, an Apple series about the Dior siblings and Coco Chanel in Nazi-occupied Paris. She’s in costume, with the uber-feminine aesthetic Christian Dior introduced after the Second World War. “Expect haute couture heartache,” Williams warned her 9.7 million Instagram followers.
Five years after Thrones ended, Williams is still offered parts that feel “very similar” to Stark. “I’ve found it really hard to land roles that are in a world like The New Look because of the Arya Stark character,” she says. “But the most amazing thing was that Todd [Kessler, the show’s creator] had never seen a single episode, so he just got to meet me as a 24-year-old woman and see a character like Catherine within me without having this tarnished view of me being kind of a scruffy boy.”
While Chanel (played by Juliette Binoche) worked with the Nazi regime and had a relationship with a Nazi officer, Catherine Dior was an agent in F2, a resistance network with ties to British intelligence. “She was standing up for what she believed in,” Williams says. “I like to see her as someone who was strong-willed and strong-minded, but perhaps not someone who wanted to be seen as this hero.” In July 1944 she was captured by the Nazis in Paris, tortured and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Miraculously, she escaped while being moved by SS guards in April 1945. In 2008 she died, aged 91, having never publicly spoken about her extraordinary life.
Mercifully, The New Look has avoided Thrones-levels of violence; we see only short snatches of torture. “There were ways that we could talk about the effects of what had happened to Catherine, show the impact that that has on a person, and that can sometimes be more important than seeing a woman on screen being tortured,” Williams says. “With a few very simple shots, we can paint a much larger picture in our minds of the sorts of things that happened rather than needing to actually go through the trauma of filming that.”
Of course, the show involves glitzy costumes too. Williams, 26, has long been a darling in the fashion set, popping up on front rows. “I wasn’t actually scooped up that graciously into the fashion world. I just put myself there,” she says. “There’s something beautiful about fashion — you can be whoever you want to be.”
Growing up on the Game of Thrones set meant struggling to find her own identity in real life, being bullied at school in Bristol (she dropped out at 14) and wrestling with top-tier fame. “Playing characters has been so enthralling, but I’ve done that through a really formative time in my life,” she says. Exploring who she was through fashion was “therapeutic”. That included all shades of hair colour: pink, purple, blue, bleach blonde.
Other Game of Thrones alumni, including Kit Harington and Sophie Turner, have spoken about the darker side of being in the world’s biggest TV show at a young age (19.3 million viewers watched the final episode). Yes, there are riches and recognition, but also pressure and opprobrium. “I was so lost for so long and I knew that I was, and when I couldn’t pin down what I felt my identity was within that, it brought me a lot of discomfort,” Williams says. “Now I feel a lot more comfortable in my own skin. It’s hard to even put myself back there and talk about how tough it was just because I think it’s done.”
When she meets child actors who are starring in the most successful shows, she offers guidance. “I really dig within myself to try and bring out something that I feel would be really useful. I’ve no idea if I ever have, but I know that at least they could text me or call me,” she says, keeping her specific advice private.
Even over Zoom from Los Angeles, baby-faced Williams seems wiser than her years. Transcendental meditation, therapy and hot yoga help to keep her sane. While making The New Look she meditated twice daily and, to look emaciated, ate very little and purposefully dehydrated herself. She suffered sleep paralysis and nightmares. Williams admits that she is “not good” at switching between playing an intense role and real life.
“I’ve tried to give myself a bit of grace because that’s actually just my process,” she says, adding that she tells her loved ones that she will fall off the grid while on the job. “I just don’t know how to do it any other way than to just really, really isolate myself in someone’s mind and world.” It sounds close to Method acting. “I feel like Method acting has this whole energy around it that’s toxic. There’s no way that if I was in character and someone asked me, ‘Hey, could you stand on your mark?’ that I would bark at them,” she says, giggling. “These behaviours are so insane.”
Williams grew up outside Bristol with three elder siblings and confesses to being a classic youngest child: “Centre of attention.” She beat 300 other girls to win the Arya Stark role — and it was her second audition. With no formal training, she learnt from watching her elder colleagues. “Charles Dance was a standout for Game of Thrones,” she recalls. “I admired watching him rehearse, and the things that he and the director talked about. I spent a lot of time as a kid just eavesdropping, staying on set and listening to people talking when I was not supposed to.”
As her professional confidence has grown, the less not winning roles has hurt. “It was at its absolute worst when I also was the most out of touch with myself — not knowing your identity and that kind of thing — I think rejection at that point felt so personal, so painful. I’d solely compare myself to other actresses, and the way people looked, and all of the most destructive ways that you can compare yourself.”
These days Williams also runs a production company and speaks about telling truly original stories rather than “the explosion of intellectual property” in Hollywood (ie films that bounce off video games and products). She brings up Barbie, which was made by the toy company Mattel’s in-house film division.
“Don’t get me wrong, the success of Barbie was so incredible last year, and brings me so much joy,” she says. “But I think that when we look at original stories that are told, and original screenplays that are made, there’s something that I feel is so much more human and magnetic.” More, perhaps, than forthcoming blockbusters like Bob the Builder produced by Jennifer Lopez.
“I understand the safety in betting on something that has a pre-existing audience,” she says. “I want to see a world that champions more original stories by up-and-coming film-makers.”
A few years ago she moved out of London. “What I settled on was that I need less stimulation and less of every hair colour.” Living in rural Sussex, she knows her postwoman and everyone at the local shop. “I just have, for the most part, manufactured my life to make me feel like I’m not famous at all.” In the run-up to this press tour, to avoid feeling overwhelmed, she largely stayed at home practising hot yoga. “It’s not normal to be rushed from room to room and asked questions as if what you say is the most important thing on earth. It’s just not,” she says, gesticulating in her Dolce & Gabbana gloves. “I’m just another person.”
The New Look is on Apple TV+
Written by: Laura Pullman
© The Times of London
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