Maisie Williams Thought Her 'Game Of Thrones' Sex Scene Was a Prank
Beware: there are some spoilers for Game of Thrones season eight ahead.
In an episode full of character moments, one scene from this week's Game of Thrones stood out: Arya Stark and Gendry having sex with each other on the eve of battle with the invading army of the dead. Maisie Williams, though, quite literally didn't believe her eyes the first time she read the scene, believing it was a "prank" from showrunners DB Weiss and David Benioff.
"Sophie said, ‘Whatever you do, you have to skip to this episode, this scene first,’" Williams told Entertainment Weekly about first reading the sex scene. "So I just read that and it was practically all I knew about the entire season."
However, as hoax storylines have long been a part of the security and laughs of the Game of Thrones production process, there was one early fake which had Jon Snow being horribly disfigured in season one, Williams dismissed it out of hand.
"At first, I thought it was a prank. I was like, ‘Yo, good one.’ And [the showrunners were] like, ‘No, we haven’t done that this year.’ Oh f***!"
It all landed much more heavily at the table read for the episode: "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."
Williams added that the "very human relationship" with Gendry marks a departure for Westeros' littlest avenging angel of death: "This is something she’s stayed away from, an emotion we’ve never really seen her engage with. David and Dan were like, ‘It’s the end of the world, what else would you have her do?’
"This may be is a moment where Arya accepts death tomorrow, which she never does: ‘Not Today.’ So it was that moment where she says, ‘We’re probably going to die tomorrow, I want to know what this feels like before that happens.’"
This story originally appeared on Esquire.co.uk. Minor edits have been made by the Esquiremag.ph editors.
