Maisie Williams on How Weird It Was to Shoot Arya Stark's Sex Scene With Gendry
Arguably one of the biggest moments of last night's Game of Thrones was Arya Stark's surprise sex scene with her childhood friend Gendry (played by Joe Dempsie). Twitter had a lot of feelings about the entire thing, and so did actress Maisie Williams, who talked to Entertainment Weekly about what it was like to shoot her first sex scene ever in the show.
Her best friend Sophie Turner, who plays her sister Sansa Stark in the show, immediately notified Williams that the sex scene was there. “I called Maisie and was like: ‘Have you read it yet?’” Turner told EW. “And she’s like, ‘I’m midway through episode one.’ And I’m like: This scene, this page, read it! This is awesome! She was very happy.”
Williams initially thought that the showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss had been playing her, since they've done it to other actors in the past. “At first, I thought it was a prank,” Williams said. “I was like, ‘Yo, good one.’ And [the showrunners were] like, ‘No, we haven’t done that this year.’ Oh f*ck! 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.”
When the day on set came to shoot the scene, it really was a little weird, Williams admitted. “In the beginning, everyone was really respectful,” she said. “No one wants to make you feel uncomfortable which kind of makes you feel more uncomfortable, because no one wants to look at anything that they shouldn’t look at, which in turn makes you feel like you look awful because everyone is kind of like," Williams averted her eyes here. "You want people to act more normal. Then [the scene] was rushed. We were [directed by] David Nutter, who has a habit of speaking fast anyway. By the end we’re rushing to finish the scene and David is going, ‘Okay, you’re going to come in and do this and do that and, great, take your top off'-and then walked off. And I’m like…'Okay. Let’s do it.’”
Williams said that Benioff and Weiss let her decide how much skin she showed on camera. “So I kept myself pretty private," she said. "I don’t think it’s important for Arya to flash. This beat isn’t really about that."
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