Maisie Williams
Margaret Constance "Maisie" Williams is an English actress. In 2011, she debuted in a professional acting role at age fourteen, starring as Arya Stark, a main-cast role in the HBO medieval fantasy epic drama series Game of Thrones, a portrayal that quickly brought the acting newcomer global attention. Williams received critical praise and accolades for her work on the show, including two nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. In 2014, she starred in her first feature film, the melodramatic coming-of-age mystery drama The Falling, for which she received critical acclaim and awards recognition. In 2018, she made her stage debut in Lauren Gunderson's play I and You at the Hampstead Theatre in London, to positive critical reviews.
Williams' other television appearances include guest starring in four episodes of the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, the British docudrama television film Cyberbully, and the British science-fiction teen thriller film iBoy. She had co-starring roles in films such as the romantic period-drama film Mary Shelley, the animated prehistorical sports comedy film Early Man, and the romantic comedy-drama film Then Came You. Williams also voiced Cammie MacCloud in the American animated web series .
Williams is also an internet entrepreneur. In 2019, she jointly developed and co-launched the social media platform Daisie, a multi-media networking app designed to be an alternative means to help artists and creators in their careers. One of the main purposes of the platform is to support collaboration between creators on artistic projects from across various creative industries, as well as a hosting service upon which creators can showcase their own and joint work.
Early life
Margaret Constance Williams was born in Bristol, on 15 April 1997, to Hilary Pitt a university course administrator. Williams' parents separated when she was four months old; the youngest of four siblings, Williams was raised by her mother and stepfather in a three-bedroom council house in the village of Clutton, Somerset.From an early age, from when "she was tiny", Williams has always been known as "Maisie", nicknamed because of her perceived likeness to the cartoon character from the UK newspaper comic strip The Perishers. Williams went to Clutton Primary School and Norton Hill School in Midsomer Norton, before transferring to Bath Dance College to study Performing Arts, with the ambition of becoming a professional dancer. For a couple of years she was taught at home. She left school at 14, before taking her final secondary school examinations, partly due to personal difficulties she experienced going back to her regular school whilst starring in a popular television series and also because of the successful commencement of her acting career.
Acting career
''Game of Thrones'' (2011–2019)
At the age of 14, in 2011, Williams started her professional acting career by co-starring in one of the largest ensemble casts on television. She was cast in the role of Arya Stark, the feisty young tomboy daughter of an important noble family in HBO's historical fantasy drama series Game of Thrones. Williams had almost missed the audition, since it coincided with a school trip to a pig farm; her mother convinced her to go to the audition. As the series viewership rose, the international popularity of Game of Thrones gave Williams global recognition. in March 2013|left|229x229pxSophie Heawood of The Guardian described Arya's eight season character arc as a journey "from cute little sister to ruthless serial killer ", and said that Arya was "the serial killer everyone's rooting for." Described as a fan favourite and one of the central protagonists in the Game of Thrones fantasy epic, Arya has a story arc across the first six seasons that encompasses severance, trauma, tragedy and revenge. A young character who witnesses both the unfair execution of her father and the immediate aftermath of her mother and brother's murder. Regarded as an anti heroine, Arya works her way through a revenge death list of names of those responsible for killing all the people she cared about. After six seasons of surviving alone she reunites with her family as a weapons expert and trained assassin. When the expected heroes and armies of the living appear defeated in the longest battle scene in film and television history, Arya Stark saves the entire fictional continent of Westeros by using her prowess as an assassin to kill the Night King which causes the simultaneous eradication of his vast undead army. Arya killing the Night King was nominated for the 2020 BAFTA TV Awards under the "Must-see moment" category. Williams, who did the majority of her own stunts and fight scenes in the series, is naturally right-handed, but kept in character by performing left handed in the show, and was told a year before the filming of The Long Night to build up her stamina for the episode. Williams appeared in all eight broadcast seasons of Game of Thrones, the final episode of which aired in May 2019.
Critical reception for Arya Stark
Williams received critical praise and recognition for her portrayal of Arya in the show. In her second year of professional acting, she was submitted in the category of Outstanding Supporting Actress for the 64th Primetime Emmy Awards by HBO, but did not make the nomination shortlist. Williams did win the 2012 Portal Award for Best Supporting Actress – Television and the Portal Award for Best Young Actor. In November 2013, she received the BBC Radio 1 Teen Award for Best British Actor. August 2014 she won "Best Supporting Actress, Drama" in the EWwy Awards. In 2015, she was awarded the Empire Hero Award, and the Saturn Award for Best Performance by a Young Actor in a Television Series In 2016, she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. In 2019, her performance in final season of the drama resulted in her again receiving the Saturn Award for Best Performance by a Younger Actor in a Television Series, as well as nominations for the Best Hero and Best Fight in the MTV Movie & TV Awards and People's Choice Awards for The Female TV Star and The Drama TV Star. Regarding Williams' second Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 2019, Daniel D'Addario from Variety said that Williams "entered the show as a child with minimal experience, but swiftly proved herself a very gifted performer... Millions watched her grow into her talents – and a fitting end to her very unusual journey through her first role" would be for her to win an Emmy.Cultural impact
The 2017 international hit Look What You Made Me Do by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift was partially inspired by William's Arya, with the line "I've got a list of names and yours is in red, underlined" inspired by her kill list, and the rapper Drake thanked Arya Stark for killing the Night King during his acceptance speech at the 2019 Billboard Music Awards. Williams was also one of ten actors from Game of Thrones featured in character in a collection of Royal Mail first class postage stamps. The set which celebrates British contributions towards the show was released to the UK Post Office in January 2018.The personal forename Arya is a real world name for both sexes of Sanskrit and Persian origins long used in South Asia. In 2012, the name Arya became the fastest-rising baby girl's name in the U.S., jumping in popularity from 711th to the 413th position, largely due to the popularity of Williams' character "Arya Stark". The name also entered the top 200 most commonly used names for baby girls born in England and Wales in 2017. Some of the rise in popularity in the west could have been due to the migration of South Asians to the west.
Other acting roles (2012–present)
In 2012, Williams took part in The Olympic Ticket Scalper a Funny or Die skit. In the same year Williams portrayed Loren Caleigh in the three part BBC supernatural thriller series The Secret of Crickley Hall. She also appeared in the independent film Heatstroke, and the short film Up on the Roof.In 2014, Williams was cast in the role of Lydia in the British melodramatic coming of age mystery film drama The Falling, set in an all-girls school, for which she was awarded the London Film Critics' Circle Award for Young Performer of the Year, Evening Standard British Film Award Rising Star and the European Shooting Stars Award at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival for her role in Carol Morley’s feature. The film premiered at the BFI London Film Festival on 11 October 2014 and was released theatrically on 24 April 2015 in the UK. Guy Lodge of Variety described Williams as "prodigiously gifted" and giving a "brilliantly articulated... bristling, often spikily funny performance."
In 2015, she played Abbie in the Irish comedy drama film Gold. In January 2015, Williams starred as Casey Jacobs in the one-hour-long BAFTA nominated Cyberbully, a Channel 4 docudrama television film. Writing for The Guardian, Filipa Jodelka described Williams' central, almost solo, performance as a "tour-de-force". In Autumn 2015, Williams guest starred in four episodes of series 9 of the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, in the recurring role of Ashildr, a Viking girl made immortal by the Doctor. Williams's performance in The Woman Who Lived was described as "superb" by Patrick Mulkern of the Radio Times.
In 2017, Williams starred, alongside Bill Milner, as Lucy in the Netflix science-fiction teen superhero thriller film iBoy. Tristram Fane Saunders of the Daily Telegraph felt she brought "depth, humour and honesty to the role." Also in 2017, Williams appeared as Isabel Baxter in, Mary Shelley a romantic period-drama film directed by Haifaa al-Mansour and written by Emma Jensen. In 2018, she voiced the character Goona, a Bronze Age fearless rebel tomboy football enthusiast in Nick Park's animated prehistoric comedy sports film Early Man that also featured Eddie Redmayne and Tom Hiddleston, though both Gwilym Mumford of The Guardian and Kate Stables of the British Film Institute noted that her accent varied during the film. From 18 October to 24 November 2018, Williams starred as Caroline in the stage play I and You, which was written by Lauren Gunderson. The play premiered at the Hampstead Theatre in London. The play did well at the box office and Willliams' stage performance was regarded a critical success, with the production later being broadcast free on Instagram from 30 November to 3 December 2018 and again during the last week of March 2020. She also starred in the eleven-minute short film Corvidae, a dark fairy tale filmed in 2013 and released in 2018, of which Craig Holton of flickfeast commented that Williams brought "an undeniably ethereal quality to this short film, helping it make the leap from grounded realism to eldritch bucolic fantasy".
In 2019, she starred in the voice cast of , an American animated web series, set in a dystopian future, which is broadcast on the Rooster Teeth subscription service. Williams voiced the role of Cammie MacCloud, a mischievous Scottish hacker, in a cast that included Michael B. Jordan, David Tennant and Dakota Fanning. Also in 2019, Williams starred alongside Asa Butterfield and Nina Dobrev in the coming of age romantic comedy-drama film Then Came You, in which she played a teenager with a terminal illness. Frank Scheck of the Hollywood Reporter felt that Williams made her "sprightly character appealingly vulnerable". The film premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival on 12 October 2018 and was released nationwide in 2019.
Upcoming roles
In 2017, Williams was cast as the Marvel superhero Rahne Sinclair / Wolfsbane, a Scottish mutant who can turn into a wolf and struggles to reconcile this with her religious beliefs, in the repeatedly delayed Disney/Fox superhero horror film The New Mutants. The film was scheduled to be released in the United States on 28 August 2020, after being pushed back due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. At the July 2020 virtual San Diego Comic-Con Comic-Con@Home fan convention, a panel featuring Williams, with co-stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Alice Braga, Blu Hunt, and Henry Zaga, plus writer-director Josh Boone and the original comic book artist Bill Sienkiewicz confirmed the intention of a “in theatres” release date of 28 August 2020. The online panel opened with a "cheeky teaser trailer" that went through the film's five previous release dates from 13 April 2018 onwards, humour continued with the Boone quipping the next thing to delay it would probably be an asteroid hitting Earth. During the panel, Williams spoke about the same-sex romance between her character Rahne and Dani Moonstar, that is at the heart of movie, which has been described as a 'groundbreaking' relationship for a superhero genre film: "It was wonderful to see a relationship like this in the typically masculine world of superheroes. It was lovely to see these two fragile women who protect one another and bring light out in each other."In 2019, it was announced that she will star as Kim Noakes, a misfit on the run from both a murderous gangster and the police, in Two Weeks to Live, a six-part dark comedy series, alongside actress Sian Clifford. The UK series, written by Gaby Hull and produced by Kudos for Sky UK, is set to debut in 2020. Also in 2019, it was reported that Williams had been cast in a 1990s-set thriller The Owners, in which Williams has been cast as a young woman who reluctantly agrees to participate in a botched robbery alongside her delinquent, no-hoper boyfriend. The film, is which is set to be released in 2020, is directed by French director Julius Berg and is adapted from the graphic novel Une Nuit De Pleine Lune by Belgian artist Hermann and writer Yves H.
Commercial promotional work
Williams delivered a feminist speech in New York at the launch of Always's 'Like a girl' campaign in 2015. The speech was aimed at the Generation Z demographic of which Williams is a member. In 2020, Williams sang "Let It Go", from the film Frozen, in an Audi commercial that aired during the broadcast of Superbowl LIV in early February 2020. In July 2020, she featured in the Apple Mac Book's "Made in the UK" campaign ad celebrating UK-based creators alongside screenwriter and actor Michaela Coel, artist Grayson Perry, film maker Jenn Nkiru, animation studio Aardman, printmaker Gabriella Marcella, rapper Dave, and others including singer Labrinth, whose song Imagination provides the soundtrack for the ad.Production companys and social media app
Daisy Chain Productions and Pint‑Sized Pictures
Williams set up Daisy Chain Productions in early 2016 with Dom Santry and Bill Milner to develop and produce UK-originated short films, theatrical features and high-end television drama, with a focus on opportunities for youth and development of talent in the UK. In 2017, the 19.54-minute short film Stealing Silver which Williams executive produced and starred in alongside Ronald Pickup, was the company's first production. She has also founded Pint‑Sized Pictures to help develop future female talent in the UK.Daisie app
Williams is also an Internet entrepreneur. With Santry, she co-developed and launched the beta version of a new iOS-compatible social media app called Daisie, on 1 August 2018. Daisie is a multi-media social networking- style platform, designed to help artists and creators of all types and backgrounds from across the various creative industries to showcase their work, discover projects and collaborate and provide an alternative route to develop their careers.Users start by signing up and creating a profile on the Daisie website, after which they can search for creative projects, and network with other users in the fields they are interested in. The way a user's profile grows is not by obtaining high follower popularity counts, friends or likes, but by connecting with other creative people and working collaboratively on projects. Williams explains, "the way your profile grows is by the chains that you make. To make a chain with someone, you have to work together." Creative users can use Daisie to showcase their own work or their collaborations in the same or multiple arts industries. They can also gain guidance from leading experts in their field via a question and answer style format with others who have more experience in their fields.
Disrupt San Francisco in 2019
Williams and Santry said that they designed Daisie as a tool for young people to bypass the obstacles, internal and external, that prevent budding artists from gaining recognition and exposure. Williams has stated that the "goal is to have a community of artists who are collaborating with each other, uploading their work, sharing their projects and ultimately... help people with their own careers, rather than our own." Daisie does not allow company profiles, the focus being on individual creators. Williams explained in 2019 that instead of creators "having to market themselves to fit someone else's idea of what their job would be, they can let their art speak for themselves."
The company is based in Shoreditch, a district in the East End of London. In May 2019 Daisie raised £2 million in seed funding from Founders Fund, 8VC, Kleiner Perkins, and from the newer venture capital firm Shrug Capital, set up by AngelList's former head of marketing Niv Dror, who also separately invested. Eleven days after the public launch, in May 2019, the number of users reached one hundred thousand most of whom were in London where the bulk of its marketing efforts have taken place in the startup's home city. On AppAdvice, Daisie achieved a score of 4 out of 5.
In 2019, Williams presented a TEDx talk in Manchester on the topic "Don't strive to be famous, strive to be talented". Williams begins by describing her childhood background, including having no formal qualifications to her name, and the seeming unsurmountable blocks on her realizing her childhood dreams of becoming a professional dancer. She says that her own personal unexpected career success, began with 'luck and timing'. Williams then states that the entertainment industry is built on gatekeepers who hold all the power. She then goes on to introduce Daisie as a social network tool for artists to collaborate with each other, and gives "control back to the creator".
Other pursuits
Personal life and fashion
Williams shares a flat with friend and fellow actor Bill Milner, with whom she works at Daisy Chain Productions. Williams is popular on social media, winning a Shorty Award in 2016 for her online presence there. The Guardian noted in 2018 that she had almost 2 million followers on Twitter and nearly 8.4 million followers on Instagram.According to Vogues Janelle Okwodu, Williams has "cultivated a quirky, youthful style", while The Daily Telegraphs senior fashion editor Emily Cronin pointed out Williams' "Street style", and that as a celebrity Williams has been courted by the fashion industry. In 2019, Williams and her boyfriend Reuben Selby started to appear on the fashion scene as a couple, regularly in coordinated ensembles. Williams shares an interest in design with Selby, who is a fashion designer, the founder of a modelling agency, co-founder of a creative agency and former communications director of Williams' social media platform Daisie.