Maisie Williams Thought Game of Thrones Fans Would Be Mad About Arya’s Big Moment
This post contains spoilers for the final season of HBO's Game of Thrones. Consider yourself warned.
Are you breathing normally yet? Have your muscles unclenched from the almost-90-minute anxiety state that was last night's epic episode of Game of Thrones? Because I'm not sure I've fully recovered yet.
There are so many moments and characters to discuss, but let's start with the most important: Arya Stark. After some incredibly harrowing moments with swarms of wights down in the bowels of Winterfell, our girl is the one who finally puts an end to the Night King. And in doing so, she saves everyone—from her siblings, Bran and Sansa, to Jon Snow, Daenerys, and the rest of #TeamWinterfell who didn't perish in battle. (RIP, Jorah and Theon.)
Maisie Williams reveals in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly that she first thought fans would be mad that Arya saves the day. “It was so unbelievably exciting,” she told EW. “But I immediately thought that everybody would hate it, that Arya doesn’t deserve it. The hardest thing 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 though, really, shouldn’t it?’”
As she learned more details, Williams understood her important role in the saga. “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 six seasons—four, if you think about it, since [Arya] got to the House of Black and White,” she said. “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.’”
Kit Harington (Jon Snow) agreed. “I was surprised, I thought it was gonna be me!” he told the publication. “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.”
Fans (including costar Sophie Turner) were pretty damn excited about the moment too. Here's just a few of the tweets about Arya's big scene:
The big question remains: Is Cersei Arya Stark's next target?
