Maisie Williams: being Arya Stark was the easy part

Maisie Williams

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	April 15, 1997 Bristol, England
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The New Mutants, Mary Shelley, Then Came You
Awards	2 Emmy · London Film Critics' Circle Award, Young British Performer of the Year (2015)

She came out of Game of Thrones with a problem most performers never face: a character so embedded in the cultural memory of the 2010s that every new project has to answer the same question first. Is this Arya Stark, or is this Maisie Williams? The distinction matters. Williams has been working — quietly and then not so quietly — to widen the gap.

Margaret Constance Williams grew up in Clutton, Somerset, the youngest of four siblings, raised largely by her mother after her father stepped away from family life early on. She came to performing through dance — ballet, tap, street, gymnastics — and found the work serious enough that she left school without sitting her GCSEs to pursue it. She was thirteen when she auditioned for Game of Thrones, found the part before she had any frame of reference for what landing it would mean, and has been working out the consequences of that fact ever since.

The show ran from 2011 to 2019. Williams appeared in all eight seasons, all 59 episodes, and grew up entirely in public — from the girl who couldn’t reach the sword to the young woman who ended the Long Night. It was one of the most watched television events of the decade, and her performance as Arya Stark, which earned two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, was consistently considered one of the show’s strongest arguments. She performed most of her own fight choreography, trained for years in left-handed combat to maintain character consistency as a naturally right-handed performer, and became the face of a kind of resilience that audiences do not forget easily.

She found ways to stretch elsewhere while the show was still running. The Falling, Carol Morley’s 2014 British drama, gave her a lead role with a completely different register — quieter, stranger, more interior — and won her the London Film Critics’ Circle Award for Young Performer of the Year. It was evidence of range at a moment when the industry wasn’t yet looking for it.

After Game of Thrones ended, the familiar post-franchise turbulence arrived. The New Mutants, a superhero film in which Williams played Rahne Sinclair, was delayed multiple times by studio reshuffles and released in 2020 to COVID-emptied theaters and divided reviews. Two Weeks to Live, a Sky One comedy miniseries she headlined the same year, fared better critically, but neither project fully announced what she was capable of on the other side of Westeros.

Pistol changed the conversation. Danny Boyle’s 2022 Disney+ miniseries about the Sex Pistols cast Williams as Jordan — Pamela Rooke, the punk icon who dressed like a daily declaration and ran the counter at SEX on the King’s Road — and gave her a role with its own mythology and its own idiom. It was the first post-Game of Thrones project reviewed entirely on its own terms rather than measured against what came before.

There is a persistent industry habit of measuring post-franchise performers against the franchises they came from, and Williams has not been immune to it. The New Mutants was positioned partly as an Arya Stark vehicle and suffered for the comparison. More revealing is what she has built around her acting work. In 2018 she co-founded Daisie, a social platform for emerging creative professionals seeking collaboration, which raised £2 million in seed funding and was used by working artists across disciplines. The company was eventually acquired and wound down, but the undertaking itself — building infrastructure for other people’s creative lives while still constructing her own — reflected an ambition the industry rarely credits performers with having. That Daisie tends to be filed as a celebrity hobby rather than a serious operational venture says more about how acting careers are expected to be narrated than it does about Williams.

She appeared as Catherine Dior — younger sister of fashion designer Christian Dior — in The New Look, Apple TV+’s 2024 series about post-war Paris and the fashion houses attempting to rebuild around it. Then came 500 Miles, a road film directed by Morgan Matthews in which she plays a free-spirited street musician, co-starring Bill Nighy and Roman Griffin Davis. The film premiered at the Dublin International Film Festival in February 2026 to encouraging notices, and positioned her comfortably in the character-led British drama space she has been quietly claiming since The Falling.

Maisie Williams in Pistol (2022) — Maisie Williams in Pistol

The largest move of this phase arrives in September 2026: Practical Magic 2, the sequel to the 1998 witchcraft film, in which Williams plays Antonia Owens alongside Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, and Joey King. It is her most prominent studio role since Game of Thrones ended and the first one that arrives with its own mythology rather than borrowing from hers — a distinction she has spent the better part of a decade earning.

HBO is reportedly in early development on a sequel series following Arya Stark. Whether Williams returns to the role — and whether she should — is a question she has not answered publicly. What the past seven years have demonstrated is that the question has grown less urgent. Practical Magic 2 opens in September. After that, the story of what Maisie Williams does next will be one she gets to write entirely on her own terms.

Tags: actors, actresses, British cinema, game of thrones, danny boyle, Maisie Williams