Maisie Williams’ Roles After Playing Arya Stark on Game of Thrones

Maisie Williams is one more recent example of an ongoing issue in the entertainment industry: child actors who try to move forward into adulthood and succeed by finding other roles. This problem has been around for a while, and different actors and actresses have dealt with it in different ways and with various outcomes.

For older folks, you might think of Steve Urkel, played by Jaleel White, and Screech Powers, played by Dustin Diamond. To this day, Jaleel White gets recognized in public and is referred to as Urkel, that iconic 90s character who bears minimal resemblance to White.

As Williams has experienced and continues to experience, it is hard for child actors to outlive their roles. Not just everyday people but also potential hirers associate them with the specific role that they play as a child.

Even more alarmingly, they perceive them still as children. It is hard to grow up – as an actor or as a person in general – when people still associate you with your childhood, when they perceive you to be a child still. Many actors, such as Dustin Diamond (before his early death), accordingly struggled to mature.

Former childhood actors have had some success and still struggled to shed their former image, with one example being Mark-Paul Gosselaar, who landed a more serious role on NYPD Blue but still found people inclined to see him as Zack Morris.

Let’s explore the ongoing career of actress Maisie Williams and see how things have shaped up for the Game of Thrones star. And don’t forget to check out our top betting sites, where you can wager on plenty of fun entertainment industry props!

Maisie Williams’ Childhood

Unlike Jaleel White, Dustin Diamond, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Maisie Williams ascended to fame on an HBO series, a drama with salient elements of fantasy called Game of Thrones. She was 12 years old when she began her role in this series.

Her character was Arya Stark, a popular anti-heroine in the series – an anti-hero is a prominent character who is not your typical hero, who does not have conventional heroic traits.

In the show, she is rebellious, going against the gender-specific norms propagated by her society in that time period, making her more likable to people today because she is well ahead of her time in the show, conforming to modern-day norms.

Maisie Williams played this character for essentially the duration of her childhood and youth, causing her to leave school early and to resort to being home-schooled. Game of Thrones lasted from 2011 to 2019, and she played Arya Stark during that whole time period, which comprised eight seasons.

The End of Game of Thrones

Maisie Williams seems to have known that her time on the show had to end.

She acknowledges that the series really fell off after having started off so strong. The show just wasn’t as good as it once was, so it was not going to keep surviving. Maisie Williams, like all of the other contributors to the show, would have to find new jobs.

In order to find new work, Maisie Williams would have to learn to see herself as someone who is not Arya Stark, despite the extent to which she identified with the character.

This was psychologically difficult for her. In some ways, she hated herself because she was not this celebrated character. She found that, for example, her body was different from Arya Stark’s, and so she disliked her own body.

But she recognized, also, that she couldn’t persist in missing the past. She knew that she needed to move forward with her life.

Finding New Jobs

Her struggle to find a renewed sense of herself made the rejection that goes with being an actress difficult to handle, taking every rejection personally. Psychologically, again, the process of renewing her acting career was so stressful for her.

One of her first roles following Game of Thrones was as Rahne Sinclair in The New Mutants, a superhero film. This film is from 2020, about a year after the end of Game of Thrones.

Since then, she has continued to find different roles, these being largely in television.

Most recently, her show The New Look debuted in February of this year on Apple TV. Her role is Catherine Dior, a concentration camp survivor. In order to play this character, she had to lose over 20 pounds.

So, her career has been difficult to sustain in physical senses, too,  but she is clearly continuing to succeed.