‘Game of Thrones’ Star Maisie Williams Assumed Arya Stark Was Queer Until Final Season

Ryan Gajewski
·2 min read
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Maisie Williams is revealing that she was a bit taken aback by a certain decision made by her Game of Thrones character during the hit HBO show’s final season.

Williams, who starred as Arya Stark on the Emmy-winning series’ eight-season run, told Teen Vogue in a video interview posted online Tuesday that, until a sex scene with Gendry Baratheon, as played by Joe Dempsie, she assumed her character identified as queer. In the season eight episode, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” which aired in April 2019, Arya and Gendry get intimate while anticipating the Battle of Winterfell.

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“The first time that I was surprised by Arya I guess was probably in the final series where she whips off her clothes and sleeps with Gendry,” Williams told the outlet. “I thought that Arya was queer, you know? So…yeah. That was a surprise.”

Back when the Game of Thrones episode first aired, the actress told Entertainment Weekly that she was surprised to read a sex scene for her character and assumed it was written as a prank by the show’s team.

“I got to the read-through and I’m reading the scene and thought, ‘Oh, we’re actually going to do this. When do I shoot this? I need to go to the gym.’ A whole list of things,” she said at the time.

Williams has recently shared a range of thoughts about her time on the hugely popular series. In April, she told British GQ that she recalled having complicated feelings about her character.

“I think that when I started becoming a woman, I resented Arya because I couldn’t express who I was becoming,” she said. “And then I also resented my body, because it wasn’t aligned with the piece of me that the world celebrated.”

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