Maisie Williams Explains How She Lost Over 26 Lbs. For Her New Acting Role

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• Actress Maisie Williams is starring in a series called The New Look where she plays Christian Dior's younger sister, Catherine, a Nazi concentration camp survivor.

• For the role, Maisie said she lost a significant amount of weight.

• The actress also said she worked with a team of medical professionals who monitored her weight loss.

For Maisie Williams’ new Apple+ drama series, The New Look, the actress lost over 26 pounds to play Catherine Dior, Christian Dior’s younger sister and a World War II French resistance fighter.

In July of 1944, Catherine Dior had been arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. She had been working for the Resistance for three years at that point as part of an intelligence-gathering network called F2, according to Harper’s Bazaar UK. She was later imprisoned by the Nazis at Ravensbrück concentration camp before being moved to two other military camps. Catherine was eventually liberated and returned to Paris in 1945.

In an interview with Harper's Bazaar UK, the 26-year-old actress opened up about her experience noting that she was supervised by a team of medical professionals throughout the weight loss process, who regularly monitored her heart rate and did blood tests to make sure she was okay.

“I was eating very little, meditating all the time, burning candles and incense in my apartment,” the Game of Thrones alum said. Maisie also explained that she lost a lot of the weight by sweating before she filmed.

“I had to be up at 4 a.m. to start sweating,” she shared. “The night before, at about 7 or 8 p.m. I was allowed to have something salty and dehydrating–some smoked salmon and a tiny glass of wine.”

After that, she would take a “boiling-hot bath with lots of salts in it.” Maisie said she “sort of levitated to bed and slept for maybe three hours, and woke up and had a handful of nuts.”

Maisie said her experience was so extreme that she had trouble sleeping through the night. “I kept waking up and feeling like a marble inside a bottle, rattling around,” she said. Maisie added that she had nightmares that featured “horrible visions of men in uniform.” She also said that she felt like she was “being trapped and attacked.”

And despite the grueling weight-loss process, Maisie shared on Instagram that the series is “something I feel so utterly proud to be a part of. Creation is survival.”

The new series begins streaming on AppleTV+ on February 14, 2024.

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