Maisie Williams on Arya’s Identity Crisis
Who is Arya Stark? over the course of five seasons, she’s been a lot of different people. She started out as the headstrong tomboy daughter of a mighty house. She then became Arry, a little boy on the road to the Night’s Watch. Then she became a girl again, now from Barrowton, working as Tywin Lannister’s cup bearer. From there, she sort of became herself again, but now as Arya Stark, prisoner of The Hound, trying to get to House Arryn.
This season? Well, she’s working on it. As an apprentice to the House of Black and White LLC, she’s done her best to become “no one.” But as we saw by the end of the season, it’s harder to let go of Arya Stark than she thinks. Talking to Making Game of Thrones, Maisie Williams tries to explain where her character’s head is at. It turns out, she thinks Arya wasn’t doing too badly with this “no one” business…until she experienced what we might call “a triggering event.”
She’s having a pretty f**ked up identity crisis. It has been a relief for her to let go of this anger and pain – to become No One and leave it all behind. But she has a big change the moment where she sees the Baratheon guards… I think it was important to show how seriously she’s taking this training to learn and better herself as a Faceless Man. When we see her drop all that in a heartbeat, it really takes her back to her anger that she saw in Seasons 3 and 4. I feel like it wasn’t a difficult decision to make to ignore the Thin Man and continue on this new adventure.
Snapping back to Arya Stark shows just what a disturbed young lady she has become. Although many cheered her murder of Meryn Trant on, I personally found it highly disturbing. Maisie says that was part of the point.
She’s had a lot more time to plan this one. And it’s a lot more personal. The stable boy was just more of an accident. Murdering the man after the Red Wedding was fueled by the same anger, but it wasn’t quite as personal. Meryn’s death is a lot more thought out and close to home. Shooting that scene was a really intense day. It was just not a pleasant scene for anyone… It shows a more psychotic side to Arya. The brutality and fierceness is quite a change in the Arya from earlier episodes this year.
The big question at the end of episode 9 when Arya tells Jaqen that the thin man “just wasn’t hungry” is if she was getting away with her lies. Maisie says Arya thought she totally was, but only as a side note—her real focus was the rage and determination to cross another name off her list. But of course, as we learn, no one was fooled. As Williams says, this sort of overeager, overreaching mistake is par for the course with her character.
When she was younger at Winterfell, all she ever wanted was to go out and fight. As soon as she lost her family, she realized that fighting for your life is not fun and it changes you as a person. It’s the same thing now: All she’s wanted is to become No One. She’s slowly realizing there’s so much more to everything in life than she’s ever even imagined. She’s totally out of her depth and lost. She’s has never been in this position where she’s out of control. Then she starts to lose her sight, and it’s just complete terror.
Oh, and on the subject of how they did that scene where she became blind—apparently those were huge contacts she was wearing. “It honestly felt like I had bottle caps in my eyelids. I couldn’t see anything out of them, so it was quite real.”
As for next season, Maisie just hopes to kill more people, though probably not anyone from Arya’s list again. Meanwhile, she’s got other plans for the off season: helping break a skydiving record!
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