The actress, who portrayed Arya Stark on the HBO adaptation, laughs that she “had the best storyline of the final season.”
Controversial final season or not, there is still one moment that resonates in the memories of “Game of Thrones” fans — and yes, this is a spoiler for a series that ended more than a year ago now.
One of those indelible images of the final season was Maisie Williams’ tiny Arya Stark leaping through the air to attack the Night King, the epic dagger drop, the final blow. Was it a satisfying ending to the Night King storyline?
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Let’s be honest, was anything satisfying about the ending of any storyline on “Game of Thrones,” including the one about who would win up on the throne?
Aside from that, though, at least Arya continued her badass story arc through to the show’s finale, including snatching one of its most iconic moments from the one character everyone thought would have it instead.
“I think I had the best storyline of the final season,” she told The Hollywood Reporter with a laugh in a recent interview. Is that a jab at all the other storylines? We may never know!
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But she also revealed that it wasn’t just fans expecting another character’s story arc to come full circle to that fateful encounter with the Night King.
“He expected it to go that way, too, and he even said, ‘It was going to go that way. Someone told me in season three that I was going to kill The Night King,” Williams said. “And then, he read the script, and it was Arya the whole time.”
She was, of course, talking about her co-star Kit Harington, who brought the enigmatic Jon Snow to life across eight seasons. His was a story of seeming destiny, complete with a mysterious backstory (for awhile), and a hero’s arc from start to finish.
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Arya’s arc was far more scrappy, though no less impressive in its way. From the start, though Jon Snow seemed to have a destiny far different than what he go. Many would argue the same for Emilia Clarke’s Daenarys Targaryen, but we digress.
Williams did raise a good point, though, in that there is storytelling value in subverting audience expectations.
“I think it would’ve been too obvious. I’m glad that it was Arya, honestly,” she said.
Does that mean she had a better story than Isaac Hempstead Wright’s Bran the Broken? Ahem.
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