Maisie Williams From Bristol To Westeros And Beyond!

Few young actors or actresses reach the heights Maisie Williams has so quickly, but after making her professional acting debut in 2011 she's gone from strength to strength and built a vocal fan base as well. But how did this young actress begin her acting journey, and where does her career path go from here?

Humble Beginnings

The above term is a little cliché but it's certainly accurate in this case, born in Bristol in April 1997 Margaret Constance Williams was the youngest of four children. Throughout her childhood, she'd be known as Maisie, after the British comic-strip character from The Perishers. Little did she know that this would be the moniker the world would one day know her by.

Unlike many child actors, Maisie was not born into the profession and while Maisie herself did go onto to study performing arts at Bath Dance College, "her first love" as she would later describe it was dancing, not acting.

She has over 4 years' experience in a variety of dance styles and gymnastics and ironically it was also her dance teacher who was in a way responsible for her getting noticed in the first place. Let's take a look at how Maisie's acting career started.

It Was All To Buy A New Laptop

People get into acting for all sorts of reasons, although few can equal the normality and practicality of Maisie's reason. She simply wanted to buy a new laptop and therefore agreed to audition and later take the part of Arya Stark in Game of Thrones. At just 11 years old she was the youngest member of the main cast at the time.

But how she even got noticed was its-self a little unusual, after being convinced by her dance tutor to try talent shows in order to get noticed Maisie was soon noticed by Louise Johnson from the Louise Johnston Management talent agency. Who convinced her to try acting instead, sensing that she had a natural gift for it.

Maisie took this advice and tried auditioning for a variety of roles, her first audition being for the movie Nanny McPhee 2, which she didn't get. It was during a later audition in which she was spotted by some of the Game of Thrones crew and was asked to audition for the role which would soon make her famous.

Since Game of Thrones

Despite being one of the most popular actresses in the show from the first season, Maisie took it slow during Game of Thrones first few seasons, appearing in only a few independent short films, she also picked up a number of award nominations and won the Portal Award for best young actor and best supporting actress in 2012 and the BBC Radio 1 Teen Award in 2013.

It was during this time that she began to take on more roles including the joint lead role in the 2014 movie The Falling as well as the main character in Cyberbully a made-for television film for channel 4 in 2015. Maisie also had a recurring role in the famous BBC show Dr Who and appeared in a variety of music videos.

More recently Maisie played the love interest in the Netflix made teen thriller iBoy, which was released in 2017 and is involved in a variety of films currently in post-production, including a future X-Men movie due to be released in 2018.

Maisie also revealed in a Reddit AMA in 2015 that she was in talks with video game developer Naughty Dog to play the role of Ellie, in the movie adaption of their award winning video game The Last of Us.

2015 was also the year when the young actress received the Shooting Stars Award at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival held in Berlin and since has received a number of other nominations and wins for both her role in Game of Thrones and her other projects.

With a number of big projects lined up in the future and at least two more seasons of Game of Thrones still to go, the sky really is the limit for Maisie Williams.

Since this article was written, Maisie has gone on to make more more Tv and film characters. To check out where she is now go to IMDB