Maisie Williams: Season 7 has fewer episodes, but “there’s just as much content”

We’ve known for a while now that Game of Thrones Season 7 won’t be exactly like previous seasons. It’ll premiere later in the year, for one thing, and won’t be as long—seven episodes vs the usual 10. While doing a Facebook Live chat with Itv Westcountry’s Kylie Pentelow, Maisie Williams got into these issues, but not before she talked generally about the experience of playing Arya Stark these past six years.

"I feel like she’s just very different to a lot of other child characters that have been written. She’s very different to a lot of female characters that have been written. And I think she’s just sort of breaking boundaries in terms of roles that are played by women and I’m so happy to be at the forefront of that. I think now that I’ve been able to play a character who’s so fully formed and three-dimensional from a young age, I hope that I never have to and never will take a role that isn’t that way, and that isn’t believable, and isn’t full of purpose."

We’re right there with you, Maisie.

We should also mention that Williams was doing this interview to discuss her work with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Here she is speaking to Bristol-area schoolchildren:

But the Game of Thrones questions came up, as they must whenever a cast member goes on camera. Williams dropped a couple of noteworthy sound bites. For example, she said that, while she hasn’t read George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books, she intends to read them after Game of Thrones is over, so she can “go back and read what was supposed to happen to Arya.” Makes you wonder how far afield of the source material the producers are going.

But Williams made her most interesting comments when teasing the upcoming season:

"We just started Series 7. It’s going very, very well. It’s a very exciting series. I’m so looking forward to people being able to watch it. It’s gonna take a long time. But it’s so worth it. And it’s a shorter series. We only have seven episodes this time. But we’re shooting for just as long, so there’s just as much content. And you guys will not be disappointed."

First of all, it’s always nice to hear a cast member praising Season 7. (Recall that Williams had a mini-meltdown on Twitter after first reading the scripts.) But the the bits about there being “just as much content” are what really piqued my interest. With fewer episodes, we’ve all assumed that we would spend less time in Westeros overall. But if there’s “just as much content,” might those episodes be super-sized?

Or Williams could just mean that the show is as jam-packed with incident as usual. Also, note that her line about the production “shooting for just as long” doesn’t necessarily mean there will be as many minutes of film. The shoots could be longer because the scenes are more complicated, not because there’s as much material to get through.

Still, her comments are intriguing. What do you guys make of them?