Maisie Williams talks breaking out of the Arya Stark mold

Maisie Williams played Arya Stark for eight seasons on Game of Thrones, endearing herself to people around the world for her performance as the hot-headed, vengeful Stark child. That image has followed her since the show ended, to the point where she told Porter that she’s ready to break away from it.

“Arya was written as hot-headed and I catch myself in roles jumping straight to being accusatory or angry or upset,” Williams said. “I’ve felt myself kind of melting away from that, because that isn’t the reality of a lot of people.”

"But it was Arya’s reality, and maybe mine, so I do find myself jumping there as if it were my place of comfort. I’d love to leave the crying and screaming for a while."

Williams has expanded far beyond Arya in the years since the end of the show, and not just by acting in shows like Pistol on FX. She’s become an entrepreneur, and has taken a different approach to style in her personal life.

Maisie Williams battles with looking traditionally “beautiful”

Williams took some time to discuss beauty standards and how her thinking on them has evolved over the years. “For the longest time, I was battling with wanting to look traditionally like what people picture as beautiful and I was getting really lost in that,” she said. “Then, I cut my hair into a mullet and said, ‘Well, I’m not going to even try any more and I’m just gonna do something which I think really suits me and is still very different to everything I’ve been doing but feels right.'”

"I was never getting the, ‘Oh my gosh, she looks so beautiful’ [comments] before, but certainly afterwards I was getting, ‘Wow, that’s really cool.’"

The looks speak for themselves:

Pistol, a docudrama about the punk rock band the Sex Pistols, premieres on FX and Hulu on May 31.

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h/t Honey