Maisie Williams has reflected on starring in Game of Thrones while going through puberty.
The actor, who is now 24, was cast in the HBO fantasy epic a few months after her 12th birthday, in 2009. She spent the entirety of her teenage years on the show, which ended in 2019.
In a new interview, Williams has recalled the day she was first handed a bra in the Game of Thrones costume trailer.
Talking about how that moment represented a distancing from the way people saw Arya Stark – as a scrappy fighter more into swords than dresses – she told GQ Style: “I think that when I started becoming a woman, I resented Arya because I couldn’t express who I was becoming.
“And then I also resented my body, because it wasn’t aligned with the piece of me that the world celebrated.”
Williams previously told Rolling Stone in 2017: “At 12, I was fearless and didn’t care, so I really enjoyed it. But then, as each season passed, the pressure built and it became a little destructive.
“Everyone goes through that dip in confidence. That also came with puberty. It all fizzled out a bit, and I lost my confidence, and now I’m slowly starting to get it back again.”
She said: “But the first two years were weird. I was having the time of my life, but I look back and I think I wasn’t really very happy because I didn’t have many friends. I had left school and I was working a lot and it was a strange time.”
Williams can next be seen in Pistol, a six-part series from Danny Boyle that follows Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones and the band’s rise to prominence and notoriety.
It premieres on Disney Plus in May.
