WARNING: This post contains spoilers from the Sunday, April 28, episode of Game of Thrones.
Even those closest to Maisie Williams were surprised to learn what her role in Game of Thrones’ “Battle of Winterfell” would be. The U.K. born actress revealed her and her boyfriend’s reactions to her character Arya Stark’s defeat of the Night King in a post-episode interview.
“It was so unbelievably exciting,” Williams, 22, told Entertainment Weekly of learning about Stark’s unlikely success. “But I immediately thought that everybody would hate it; that Arya doesn’t deserve it. The hardest thing is in any series is when you build up a villain that’s so impossible to defeat and then you defeat them. It has to be intelligently done because otherwise people are like, ‘Well, [the villain] couldn’t have been that bad when some 100-pound girl comes in and stabs him.’ You gotta make it cool. And then I told my boyfriend and he was like, ‘Mmm, should be Jon [Snow] though really, shouldn’t it?’”
Williams, however, became more invested in the idea as they began to film, and she was reminded of all the work her character has put in over the years to get to this point.
“When we did the whole bit with Melisandre, I realized the whole scene with [the Red Woman] brings it back to everything I’ve been working for over these past 6 seasons — 4 if you think about it since [Arya] got to the House of Black and White,” she explained. “It all comes down to this one very moment. It’s also unexpected and that’s what this show does. So then I was like, ‘F—k you Jon, I get it.’”
Williams and her beau weren’t the only ones who thought Kit Harington’s Jon Snow would be the one to kill the Army of the Dead leader.
“I was surprised, I thought it was gonna be me!” Harington, 32, told EW. “But I like it. It gives Arya’s training a purpose to have an end goal. It’s much better how she does it the way she does it. I think it will frustrate some in the audience that Jon’s hunting the Night King and you’re expecting this epic fight and it never happens — that’s kind of Thrones. But it’s the right thing for the characters. There’s also something about it not being the person you expect. The young lady sticks it to the man.”
The final season of Game of Thrones airs on HBO Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.
