The Reason Maisie Williams Had Issues With Arya Stark's Wardrobe
Maisie Williams has nothing but great memories from her tenure on Game of Thrones ... well, mostly. One of the only things she didn't love about the HBO smash was her on-screen counterpart, Arya Stark's, wardrobe.
During an interview with 60 Minutes in April 2019, Williams explained that she grew up and developed much faster than her fan-favorite character, which made for some seriously uncomfortable costumes. "There were a few seasons in the middle where I had to wear, like a — like a strap," she said, motioning in front of her chest and chuckling. "Just to reverse puberty for the first few years while Arya was pretending to be a boy."
After a while, Williams continued, the strap stopped working, so producers and costume designers had to find something else. "So I was about 15, right? And they gave me this little chubby belly, so it would even out the playing field," she went on. "I was about 15 years old, like, 'I kind of just want a boyfriend! I don't want to wear this! This little pillow belly, this doesn't feel good!'"
Did Arya Stark's wardrobe ever catch up with Maisie Williams?
It wasn't until season 6 that Arya Stark got her new costume (complete with a bra!), but when she did, Maisie Williams said she was overjoyed. The TV star recalled to 60 Minutes with a laugh, "I was like, 'I don't have to wear this strap anymore!'"
While her Game of Thrones character's costume was finally age-appropriate, that strap unfortunately wasn't the worst part of Williams' Stark look. She previously explained on Late Night with Seth Meyers in 2016 that when her character was blind during the show, she had to wear huge, hand-painted contact lenses that were pretty painful. "But you guys are like, 'You're an actress, stop complaining,'" she said, adding, "But these are like 16 mm wide! How wide are your contact lenses?" Williams added that those huge lenses were only for extreme closeups, but she wore other lenses with pinholes in them to make it easier for her to see during more action-oriented scenes — but they still weren't comfortable.
Maisie Williams grew up in front of HBO cameras, and so did a lot of her castmates. Find out how far these Game of Thrones stars got in school.