Hard times. Maisie Williams revealed that playing Arya Stark hurt her body image in an interview with Vogue published on Wednesday, October 2.
“Around season 2 or 3, my body started to mature and I started to become a woman,” the Game of Thrones alum, 22, told Vogue during Paris Fashion Week. “But Arya was still very much , like, trying to be disguised as a boy.”
The actress revealed that the wardrobe and makeup department had to make her look less feminine for her portrayal of Arya as Williams’ body developed. Instead of learning to embrace her body, she recalled to Vogue how it was detrimental to her self confidence.
“I had really short hair and they’d constantly cover me in dirt and shade my nose so it looked really broad and I looked really manly” she said. “They’d also put this strap across my chest to flatten any growth that had started. I don’t know, that just felt horrible for six months of the year, and I felt kind of ashamed for a while.”
Now that the show is over, Williams said she plans on experimenting with styles that are more suited to her personal taste.
“So you know we’ve this new phase of my style. Like it’s nice to look more feminine and like have a real waistline and just you know embrace the body that I have,” she said.
Arya’s own womanhood was thrown into the spotlight during an episode of the HBO series in April where she lost her virginity to former traveling companion Gendry (Joe Dempsie). Some fans claimed on social media they felt uncomfortable watching Arya in a sexual situation since Maisie was only 11 years old when she was first cast in the role.
The English actress chimed in on Twitter that fans weren’t the only ones who didn’t like the scene.
“if u feel uncomfortable just know that my mother and my step dad and my 2 sisters and my 4 brothers have all probably watched this too ahahakillmeehehe,” she tweeted on April 23.
Williams told Entertainment Weekly that her costar Sophie Turner warned her about Arya’s sex scene in the script before she had a chance to read it herself.
“Sophie said, ‘Whatever you do, you have to skip to this episode, this scene first,’” Williams recalled. “So I just read that and it was practically all I knew about the entire season.”
The New Mutants star added that it was a daunting scene to film.
“No one wants to make you feel uncomfortable which kind of makes you feel more uncomfortable, because no one wants to look at anything that they shouldn’t look at, which in turn makes you feel like you look awful,” she said. “You want people to act more normal.”
