Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner talk career, life and Game of Thrones

Man, Game of Thrones stars Maisie Williams (Arya) and Sophie Turner (Sansa) can really take a photograph. An example, from Williams’ latest adventure on the cover of S Magazine:

Between the photos, Williams talked about her life in Westeros, which ends with the upcoming eighth season. “This whole season was really, really emotional,” she said. “When I came to shoot my final scene, I had already watched a lot of people wrap and seen all the tears and heard all the speeches…It was just a really beautiful day, and a really great final scene for me. It felt like the right time to say goodbye to Arya.”

Williams has many fond memories of her time with the show, particularly when it came to all the stunts she got to do. “It was a lot of crazy fun pretending to beat the hell out of each other,” she said. Williams came into the show with a background in dance, and credits the stune team for uglying things up for medieval times. “With the stunt team, I worked on making [my moves] look more angry and evil and not so balletic and sweet.”

But it wasn’t all pleasant. As a young women growing up in the public eye, Williams had to undergo some unique trials. “There are times when people feel like they own you, especially when you’re going through your adolescence and trying to figure out who you are and really put a stamp on your personality,” she said. “There are a billion people saying, ‘Oh that’s not right. This isn’t you.’ That was really, really confusing as a 15-year-old. I felt like I was constantly trying to do the right thing, say the right thing, not piss people off, but also trying to become my own woman.” In the end, though, the pros far outweigh the cons:

"It’s bizarre, but obviously amazing, when you go to a place you’ve never been in your life on the other side of the planet and there’s hundreds of people screaming at you. The scale of the show is unbelievable…[Some fans] just dedicate their lives to supporting me. I’m so grateful for people like that. It makes you feel incredible."

Then there’s all the help she gets from her fellow castmates. “The calibre of actors I’ve been able to work with on the show has been such a high standard,” she said. “It’s not every day you get to work with actors like that, and I was surrounded by them from such a young age. It’s just been so beneficial to me.” She singled out Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister) as someone who always leveled with her. “Lena has always treated me like a young adult,” Williams remembered. “Even when I was a kid, she never treated me as one. I really loved that, because it was such a weird world; one week, I was at school having to raise my hand to ask to go to the toilet, and the next week we’re with fans signing autographs. She just always respected me.”

But if there’s one cast member Williams grew especially close to, it has to be Sophie Turner, who plays Arya’s sister Sansa. Much like her onscreen sister, Turner is also appearing on a magazine cover. This one has a unicorn:

“I’m just coming to terms with [the end of Game of Thrones] right now, it’s like a death in the family,” Turner told Bazzar. “I’m losing the character I’ve played so long.”

Sansa has gone on a traumatic journey over the course of the show, one that managed to affect Turner even if she didn’t realize it at first. “I think it hasn’t affected me emotionally, [but] I did start thinking about the domestic abuse and rape, and it spurred this little part of me that might be an activist,” she said.

Indeed, Turner is a major advocate for the #MeToo movement, and insists that her contracts have an inclusion rider whereby she can ensure a 50-50 male/female workforce. “Now, you see women in the camera departments, producing, directing. It’s exciting.”

It’s not equal all the time, though. For example, Turner’s Game of Thrones costar Kit Harington made more than her for their work on the show, but Turner is willing to overlook that on account of some extenuating circumstances we’ll probably see play out in the final season. “[F]or the last series, he had something crazy like 70 night shoots, and I didn’t have that many. I was like, ‘You know what… you keep that money.'”

What’s important to Turner is that people are having these conversations, and that executives are “more willing to listen to people saying, ‘I want the same amount of money.’ So things are getting done, but it will take a while, I think…”

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You can head to Bazaar to hear more from Turner and S Magazine to hear more from Williams. And we’ll see both of them back in action on Game of Thrones when it returns on April 14.

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