Maisie Williams Opens Up About That Game of Thrones Sex Scene Between Arya and Gendry
There was a lot going on during last night's episode of Game of Thrones as everyone at Winterfell was preparing to battle the Night King and his Army of the Dead, but there was one scene in particular that had the Internet talking: that sex scene between Arya Stark and Gendry. The pair took part in some mildly flirtatious banter last week when Arya asked him to create a new weapon for her; this week they took their relationship to a new level.
Maisie Williams, who plays Arya, told Entertainment Weekly that she first thought the show's writers were joking when she saw the script. “At first, I thought it was a prank,” she said. “I was like, ‘Yo, good one.’ And [the showrunners were] like, ‘No, we haven’t done that this year.’ Oh f--k!”
It was her best friend and costar Sophie Turner who alerted Williams to the scene's existence. “I called Maisie and was like: ‘Have you read it yet?’” Turner tells EW. “And she’s like, ‘I’m midway through episode one.’ And I’m like: This scene, this page, read it! This is awesome! She was very happy.”
Williams confirmed this, recalling, “Sophie said, ‘Whatever you do, you have to skip to this episode, this scene first.’ So I just read that and it was practically all I knew about the entire season…. 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.”
Naturally, people on Twitter had strong—and mixed—reactions to seeing this side of Arya.
Williams, now 22, was just 12 when she started Game of Thrones, so the cast and crew approached the filming of the scene with sensitivity. "David and Dan [the showrunners] were like: ‘You can show as much or as little as you want,’” Williams said. “So I kept myself pretty private. I don’t think it’s important for Arya to flash. This beat isn’t really about that. And everybody else has already done it on the show, so…. In the beginning, everyone was really respectful. 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 because everyone is kind of like—[Williams averts her eyes]. You want people to act more normal.”
“It’s obviously slightly strange for me because I’ve known Maisie since she was 11, 12 years old,” Joe Dempsie, the actor who plays Gendry, said. “At the same time, I don’t want to be patronizing toward Maisie…so we just had a lot of fun with it.”
But the scene was more than just sex, as far as Williams is concerned. “It was really interesting because it’s a very human relationship for Arya,” she told EW. “This is something she’s stayed away from, an emotion we’ve never really seen her engage with. David and Dan were like, ‘It’s the end of the world, what else would you have her do?’ This may be a moment where Arya accepts death tomorrow, which she never does—‘Not Today.’ So it was that moment where she says, ‘We’re probably going to die tomorrow, I want to know what this feels like before that happens.’ It’s interesting to see Arya be a bit more human, speak more normally about things people are scared of.”
New episodes of Game of Thrones air on Sundays at 9:00 PM EST on HBO.
