‘Game of Thrones’ Star Maisie Williams Was Shocked About Major Aspect of Arya Stark’s Character in Final Season

Game of Thrones fans weren’t the only ones who suspected Arya Stark was queer. In a new Teen Vogue interview, star Maisie Williams admitted she thought so too. She was as surprised as anyone else when Arya shared a sex scene with Joe Dempsie’s Gendry Baratheon in the final season.

“The first time that I was surprised by Arya I guess was probably in the final series where she whips off her clothes and sleeps with Gendry,” Williams, 25, told Teen Vogue this week. “I thought that Arya was queer, you know? So… yeah. That was a surprise.”

Williams and Dempsie’s characters had sex in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” the second episode of Season 8. After the episode aired, there were plenty of headlines calling it one of the most surprising sex scenes in the show’s run, and fans were disappointed on Twitter. “Happy for Arya and a nice Lil consensual empowering moment of sex on the show but Arya Stark not being a powerful lesbian is the LEAST believable thing in this show about zombies and dragons,” one person tweeted after the episode aired in April 2019.

This isn’t the first time Williams has spoken about how surprising the scene was. The day after the episode aired, she told Entertainment Weekly she thought the writers were playing a prank on her and Dempsie, 34. Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss had a habit of sending their actors fake scenes to keep secrets from spilling, so she had a reason to suspect that. “At first, I thought it was a prank,” Williams told EW. “I was like, ‘Yo, good one.’ And [the showrunners were] like, ‘No, we haven’t done that this year.’ Oh, f—!”

When it came time for the table read with her co-stars, Williams accepted that she would have to do a sex scene before the big Winterfell battle. “I got to the read-through and I’m reading the scene and thought, ‘Oh, we’re actually going to do this. When do I shoot this? I need to go to the gym.’ A whole list of things,” she said.

Williams and the showrunners also discussed how much nudity would be shown in the scene. Williams was only 12 when she joined the show and 22 when she filmed the scenes. Benioff and Weiss agreed to let Williams decide how much of herself she wanted to show to the camera. “I kept myself pretty private. I don’t think it’s important for Arya to flash. This beat isn’t really about that. And everybody else has already done it on the show, so…,” Williams said.

The scene was filmed very quickly, but that didn’t erase another awkward aspect of it all. Dempsie is almost a full decade older than Williams and admitted it was odd for him to film. “It’s obviously slightly strange for me because I’ve known Maisie since she was 11, 12 years old,” Dempsie told EW. “At the same time, I don’t want to be patronizing toward Maisie – she’s a 20-year-old woman. So we just had a lot of fun with it.”

Williams now stars in the FX on Hulu series Pistol, a miniseries about The Sex Pistols directed by Danny Boyle and based on Steve Jones’ book about his time with the band. Toby Wallace plays Jones, while Williams has a recurring part as the late British model Pamela Rooke. She is also slated to play Catherine Dior in the upcoming Apple TV+ series The New Look.