No matter how you feel about the way Game of Thrones wrapped up its final season, one thing everyone can agree on is that the show was always successful in being shocking — and not just for the audience, it turns out.
In a recent interview with Teen Vogue, Maisie Williams, who played Arya Stark in the series, shared the moment that left her in shock: “In the final series where she whips off her clothes and sleeps with Gendry (Joe Dempsie),” she said. “I thought that Arya was queer, you know? So…yeah. That was a surprise.”
To be fair, Arya could still be queer (and is in our head canon, anyway) since bisexuality exists.
This wasn’t the first time Williams opened up about being caught off guard by the character’s turn. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2019, she told the publication she was sure the scripted scene was just a “prank” put there by series showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss. The two had a history of sending out joke scripts, so Williams’ first response was “Yo, good one,” she recalled.
It wasn’t until the final table read that she was convinced it was a real scene. “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 recounted.
Fortunately, she had total control as to how much skin she would show. “David and Dan were like: ‘You can show as much or as little as you want.’ So I kept myself pretty private,” she recounted. “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…”
Williams has previously talked about the complicated relationship she had with her body while going through puberty on the show. In an interview with GQ UK in April, she recalled how she felt when her changing body didn’t align with her character. “I think that when I started becoming a woman, I resented Arya because I couldn’t express who I was becoming,” she says. “And then I also resented my body, because it wasn’t aligned with the piece of me that the world celebrated,” she told the magazine.
While she ultimately looks back fondly on her experience making the hit HBO series, she’s more focused on looking to the future. Most recently, she starred as Jordan in Pistol, Hulu’s mini-series about the legendary British punk band Sex Pistols.
