Maisie Williams uninterested in trying to “top” Game of Thrones

Maisie Williams talks about the futility of trying to “top” Game of Thrones, her new comedy Two Weeks to Live, and staying grounded in the midst of fame.

To Game of Thrones fans, Maisie Williams will always be Arya Stark, but since the show ended the 23-year-old actor has set herself apart with bold choices. Take her role in the Sky One series Two Weeks to Live, where she plays a girl, Kim, raised to survive in isolation who ventures into the wider world only to be convinced that an apocalypse is coming in two weeks, weeks she intends to spend hunting down the man who murdered her dad in front of her when she was a child. There are definitely shades of Arya Stark there, but Two Weeks to Live is a lot snappier and funnier. Take a look:

“It probably wasn’t the most challenging thing that I’ve done,” Williams admitted to Independent. “But I guess that’s also why it was great timing, because I’d just come off 10 years of HELL! No, 10 years of joy!”

The hell-joy she’s referring to is, of course, Game of Thrones, the iconic series that launched Williams into the acting stratosphere. She is fully aware that people are going to compare her work in Two Weeks to Live to Game of Thrones, but she’s not interested in trying to “top” herself in that regard. “I’m sure every single person who was on Game of Thrones has been asked: what are you gonna do now?” she said. “There’s always the accusation, or query, as to whether you’re going to do anything that was that successful again.

"But what we did on Game of Thrones was unprecedented, and if you try and do something like that again, you’re only gonna fail. Because that sort of thing only comes around once. A big box office smash viewed by millions and millions of people around the world – it’s never gonna top that. So that’s just not a fulfilling thing to go after."

I think that’s a tremendously healthy way to look at it. Indeed, somehow Williams has managed to maintain a healthy attitude about everything in her life, even when she was in the crosshairs of fame at a young during the height of Thrones mania. There’s a cliche that child actors turn out maladjusted, but all of the kids on Game of Thrones seem to have beaten the odds, including Williams.

“Even when I was 12, people were like: ‘Ooh, are you gonna get a drug habit and ruin your life?’” she recalled. “That is the problem, I guess: the fact that you’re doing interviews when you’re 12 and no one’s ever addressing why that’s a really difficult and dangerous thing for you to do. Everybody wants you to have an opinion on something when you don’t know who you are yet. So I was really quick to understand that: these people aren’t my friends. People just want to go where the money and drama is. And I wanted to really protect myself.”

In response to all this, Williams had to “grow up really fast” even while realizing that doing that “can also mess you up. It’s a minefield [and] it’s a challenge every single day.”

As she notes, the challenges aren’t over, but it’s great to see that she seems to have found a way to navigate through this minefield. For example, her new movie The New Mutants is getting hammered by critics, but she’s obviously keeping a sense of humor about it:

With that kind of attitude, I’m interested in whatever Williams chooses to do, especially when she says she intends to keep pushing herself into new areas. Before Two Weeks to Live, she hadn’t been in a straight-up comedy, but it looks like it worked out. “I think that so much great work comes from being super uncomfortable – as an actor, obviously, not for everyone,” she told NME. “But when you’re pushed to some sort of emotional extreme in real life then, when you’re on camera, it just creates some crazy magic that you can’t fake. It’s just real.”

Two Weeks to Live debuts on September 2 on Sky One.

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