Maisie Williams regrets that Arya never got to complete her kill list on Game of Thrones
Arya Stark never managed to kill one bearing green eyes… (contains season eight finale spoilers)
Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams has revealed her biggest regret in the fantasy show’s final series – the fact that Arya Stark was not the one who killed Cersei Lannister.
Many Thrones fans predicted that the teenage assassin would be the one to take down the scheming queen, after the Red Witch Melisandre predicted in season three that she would kill three different individuals bearing brown, blue and green eyes. After killing Walder Frey in season six and The Night King at The Battle of Winterfell, the green-eyed Cersei seemed to be Arya’s next natural prey.
However Cersei, played by Lena Headey, met her maker at the hands of Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), whose fiery attack on King’s Landing saw Cersei crushed beneath the rubble, with Jamie Lannister by her side.
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Explaining her disappointment, Williams explained, “I just wanted to be on set with Lena again, she’s good fun.
“And I wanted Arya to kill Cersei even if it means [Arya] dies too. Even up to the point when Cersei’s with Jaime I thought [while reading the script], ‘He’s going to whip off his face [and reveal its Arya]’ and they’re both going to die. I thought that’s what Arya’s drive has been.”
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However, Williams adds that the path her character has been on in the final season means that it makes sense for her to turn away and not complete her 'list' of targets.
“The Hound says, ‘You want to be like me? You want to live your life like me?’” Williams explained to Entertainment Weekly. “In my head, the answer was: ‘Yeah.’ But I guess sleeping with Gendry, seeing Jon again, realizing she’s not just fighting for herself anymore but also her family — it’s bringing up all these human emotions that Arya hasn’t felt for a long time. When The Hound asks her if she has another option, all of a sudden there are so many more things in [Arya’s] life that she can live for, that she can do. It was a shock for me because that wasn’t how I envisioned her arc going this year. Then I realised there were other things I could play, bringing Arya back to being a 16-year-old again.”
She concluded, “It’s not a Game of Thrones ending for Arya, it’s a happy ending. It gave me a place to take Arya that I never thought I’d go with her again.”
Williams was not the only one who was disappointed that Arya and Cersei never shared a scene howeber, with Headey also echoing the sentiment.
“I lived that fantasy until I read the script,” Headey said. “There were chunky scenes and it was nothing that I had dreamt about. It was a bit of come down and you have to accept that it wasn’t to be. There is something poetic about the way it all happens in the end with her and Jaime.”
With Arya finishing the series by heading west of Westeros, Williams herself is leaving Game of Thrones behind for a series of very different roles.
As well as starring in upcoming X-Men spin-off The New Mutants, she has also been confirmed as a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK.
