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Maisie Williams has dabbled in witchcraft precisely as soon as. The actor was on the point of audition for a half in a movie. “I wanted it so badly that I went on to Etsy, and I paid a witch to manifest me the role,” she says, poker-faced.
“It didn’t work, and that was where my days of witchcraft ended,” she provides, breaking into an infectious cackle.
The spell could not have labored that point, however Williams will quickly attempt her personal hand at witchcraft on display in Practical Magic 2. The sequel to the beloved 1998 romcom, about two supernatural sisters performed by Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, it options Williams as Antonia, the youngest daughter of Bullock’s Sally Owens. She by no means did get her a reimbursement from her Etsy witch. “It was maybe, like, £16.50? Which is not going to break the bank, but good for her. Good for her, to be making money doing nothing!” Williams laughs once more.
We meet on a sweltering afternoon at a fancy pub in Belgravia in London the place girls in expensive-looking sundresses are consuming Aperol spritzes on the terrace. Williams arrives from a busy day of appointments. She removes a pair of outsized gray headphones and units them down on the desk (she was listening to the US singer-songwriter Slayyyter on the stroll over). “I’m in my business outfit because I’ve had business meetings,” she explains. (It’s arguably a really gen Z tackle company dressing: lengthy, darkish hair worn in a sensible ponytail, white T-shirt, good gray trousers with an identical gray miniskirt hooked up, chunky, don’t‑mess-with-me Prada boots.)
Today’s agenda has included two jewelry fittings for a purple carpet occasion, an “important producing meeting, with me as the producer” and lunch along with her former Game of Thrones co-star Hannah Murray. The pair had been catching up and discussing Murray’s latest memoir, The Make-Believe, about her devastating expertise with a wellness cult. The group promised religious therapeutic by way of costly, elaborate rituals; Murray skilled a psychotic episode and was later recognized with bipolar dysfunction. “I knew something was going on, but I didn’t know it was that,” Williams says. “I felt really upset with myself for not asking sooner.”
Williams says she hasn’t at all times been a sceptic relating to magic. “I used to indulge in the whimsy of the patterns of the universe and think, ‘Oh, it’s a sign that everything’s going to work out.’” She says, taking a sip of Diet Coke. But after studying Murray’s ebook, Williams determined that trying to find symbols in each day life may not be so healthful in spite of everything. “I realised it leaves your mind slightly malleable to seeing a sign because you think it’s a divine intervention, and not just a good, fun coincidence.”
The 29-year-old actor might be nonetheless finest often called Arya Stark from Game of Thrones, the baby-faced murderer who shot her to stratospheric ranges of fame at age 12. I keep in mind first seeing her in Carol Morley’s The Falling, during which she stood out as a prickly, stiff‑backed schoolgirl reverse a then unknown Florence Pugh. In the seven years since Game of Thrones ended, Williams has landed roles in Marvel spin-off The New Mutants, in Danny Boyle’s miniseries Pistol as punk icon Jordan, and in Apple TV’s The New Look, a shiny drama about Christian Dior and Coco Chanel in Nazi-occupied Paris. She has began her personal manufacturing firm, and co-hosts the Frank Film Club podcast with two of her pals. It has been a interval of attempting various things, of trying to find gentle aid, after an extended stretch coping with some a lot darker stuff. Last 12 months, she even bought a brand new agent. “He was bringing me fun things and was calling me every day,” she says. One of these enjoyable, surprising issues was Practical Magic 2.
Williams had seen the unique a couple of times, however rewatched it earlier than her audition. “The first movie has a lot of different beats to it,” she says diplomatically. That’s one technique to put it: tonally, the movie is all over. Based on an Alice Hoffman novel, it tells the story of the Owens sisters, two witches doomed by an ancestral curse: any man who falls in love with an Owens girl is destined to die. It is a cult basic, with fabulous 90s costumes, Bullock and Kidman drunkenly dancing around their kitchen to Harry Nilsson’s Coconut and a jarringly darkish home violence subplot. The sequel is way slicker. Directed by Susanne Bier, it sends Sally’s extra rebellious eldest daughter Kylie (Joey King) to England as she tries to interrupt the household curse. Bullock and Kidman go after her, bickering the entire method, whereas Williams’s character, a trainee neurosurgeon, holds the fort at dwelling.
“Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman are real movie stars – from a time in cinema that is escaping us,” says Williams matter-of-factly. “I went into this film seeing them as otherworldly.” She remembers assembly the actors for the primary time on the read-through. Later that day she was heading to Glastonbury competition. “I got back in my car, and I wound the windows up, and I was just like … ” Williams claps each French-manicured arms to her face and lets out a high-pitched shriek. “I had my dog in the car. He was probably thinking, ‘What is going on?!’ And then I drove to Glastonbury.” On set, in between takes, the veteran Hollywood actors imparted essential knowledge to their youthful co-stars. But it wasn’t in regards to the business. “We spoke about how being friends with your ex is a fallacy,” she says. Who stated that? Was it Kidman, who’s not too long ago divorced? “We all said that!” Williams demurs.
In the movie, Williams and King are an inseparable sister duo, snuggled below the covers at their mum’s home and whispering as in the event that they’re at a sleepover. In actual life, Williams has three siblings, together with one sister who’s 5 years her senior. “When we’re together it’s like no time has passed but we’re not … ” She pauses. “We don’t call every day,” she says. “We’ve had waves in our life when we’re a lot closer, but a lot of our connection now comes through the kids.” Williams takes her niece and nephew on tenting journeys. “We never went out partying together,” she says. And, anyway, when she would have been the proper age, Williams was busy filming Game of Thrones. “I was away most of the time, and I’d moved out as well.”
Williams’s path to baby stardom got here by way of a curiously X Factor-themed college nativity play. “I played Sharon Osbourne, and had done such a good job that my friend’s mum felt compelled to tell my mum, ‘You should put her into classes.’ That was when I started taking it seriously, because they were taking me seriously.” Then issues bought very severe, with Williams barely in secondary college when she landed a function on Game of Thrones. The pace at which her profession took off formed her expectations of the movie business, she says. “I thought, oh! Whatever you want, you can get. Like that,” she says, snapping her fingers. “That was how I thought the industry was.” Her naivety, she reckons, was an excellent factor. “It informed the way I see life, and the way I threw myself into what turned out to be a huge responsibility.”
Those early constructive experiences, she says, gave her the arrogance to pursue her goals. “I wasn’t knocked down as a child. I wasn’t knocked down by my mum. I wasn’t knocked down by teachers at drama school, and I wasn’t knocked down by the industry when I did start auditioning.” Williams wonders if she would have nonetheless been resilient if she hadn’t loved early success. “I think that a lot of people have a gift, but they just don’t get cast in a huge TV show when they’re 12.”
Williams claims to not find out about an Arya Stark spin-off film that’s reportedly in growth with HBO. “I saw that, too! I was like, huh?” Would she be all for returning to that character? “I don’t know, really. She would have to be developed in some way because I feel like I’ve changed so much, and I feel like what people loved about Arya is that she was always a child doing things that were quite grownup.”
In individual, Williams is heat however considerably guarded; she sits subsequent to me on the leather-based banquette however maintains a cautious distance. She is nice firm, with a beaming smile and a wonderful, trilling chortle, however a number of instances in our dialog I sense her weighing up her phrases. When requested about her adolescence rising up between Bristol and Somerset she turns into visibly uncomfortable. She settles on an sincere, abridged reply. “My mum and my siblings and I spent a lot of time with my auntie,” she says, including that she was principally raised by the 2 girls. “My auntie was a childminder with loads of other kids, so my life was vibrant and silly and fun and playful.”
Williams describes herself as “not coming from a hugely privileged background”. I ponder how, getting ready to 30, she displays on rising up with much less. “When I reflect on myself as a child, I wish I could just tell her it’s going to be fine. It’s going to work out. I think the fear that I felt at that time was so defining for many years of my childhood. I didn’t know. I was so ambitious as a small child, and I think maybe that did come from wanting my life to be different.”
In 2022, Williams spoke in regards to the difficulties she confronted again then on the Diary of a CEO podcast. Her dad and mom break up up when she was a child, and her father is no longer in her life. “I had a traumatic relationship with my dad, and ever since I can remember I have struggled sleeping,” she informed host Steven Bartlett. She described a instructor noticing her struggling in school and asking if she ate breakfast within the mornings. Williams stated she didn’t. She was eight. The instructor referred to as her mum. “I would look around at other kids and be, like, ‘Why don’t they seem to understand this pain or dread or fear? Joy – when does that come for me?” she stated on the podcast.
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“I have very close friends that I had not told,” Williams says at present. “What I said on that podcast was all I’ve said about it to a lot of people, other than my family and my therapist. I even had boyfriends who didn’t know. So my reluctance to want to talk about it again is because my relationship to fame, and my relationship to success, was hugely defined by my childhood experience, and so that being explored in such a public setting now feels a little bit … terrifying?” She winces.
“I think it reached a lot of people who were in the same position, and I’m really happy that it did.” I’m curious to know why she selected that second to lastly discuss what had occurred to her. “I always wanted to,” she says. “I think part of the reason why I was so good at playing Arya was because of how I’d grown up.”
She says journalists would typically ask her how she was capable of entry such troublesome feelings as a youthful, much less skilled actor. “I always felt like it was something I couldn’t say. I could access these emotions because I felt them myself, every one of them, for really extended periods of time.” What feelings? “Anger and fear.” She lets out a bitter chortle. “Stonewalling. I know that feeling of shutting down. These things that you don’t really start to understand about yourself until a lot later.” Being an adolescent, she says, is already so fraught with emotion.
By the time she recorded that podcast, “I had done a lot of therapy,” she says, “and so was feeling a lot clearer about a lot of things.” It was Bartlett’s preliminary query that cracked them open for her. “He said, ‘What happened to you as a child that defines how you are?’ or something. It’s literally the only question that someone would have to ask me for me to answer honestly.” I used to be struck by her candour and vulnerability in that interview, I inform her. “I just thought that by releasing it, it was the last step in being free from it. Which kind of turned out to be true,” she says.
I ponder what she makes of Bartlett now. “Mmm,” she says, eyebrows elevating, her mouth tightening right into a horizontal line. In latest years, Bartlett has turn into a controversial determine, who has been criticised for amplifying medical misinformation and platforming manosphere-adjacent company reminiscent of fellow podcaster Chris Williamson, who blamed declining birthrates on “women’s socioeconomic emancipation into the workforce”. Bartlett has aired the views of “experts” who claimed that Covid vaccines had been “a net negative for society” and that most cancers could possibly be handled by a keto food regimen. It’s not a present that appears significantly aligned with liberal values.
“At the time, it felt like he had a podcast that felt fresh and different,” Williams says. “After, I felt slightly like I had been part of a podcast that gets a lot of views based on uprooting trauma. When I saw the trailer to the episode, I felt slightly icked out by how he had clipped it. But ultimately I can’t control that. Now I just feel like it’s quite dangerous, some of these conversations that are being had and taken out of context.”
Still, talking about her experiences publicly was “a huge, defining moment of change” for Williams. “The first half of my 20s was just hell, but I think maybe it is for a lot of people,” she says. “I think that has more to do with the fact that Game of Thrones was ending, and I didn’t know what I was going to do next, and I just needed a break, to be honest with you. And then it also has to do with delayed teenage awkward years, and figuring a lot of things out that I felt like maybe I couldn’t do much earlier than that. And also Covid, and also an industry strike,” she provides with a shrug. The pub is getting noisy, filling up with finance bros who’ve simply completed work.
“But post-2023, every day has been getting better,” she says. What occurred in 2023? “I started seeing my friends again. I moved out of London. I was living alone. I was back with my dog. Everything was different,” she says. Williams is just too discreet to substantiate whether or not this variation was sparked by the breakup of her lengthy‑time period relationship with designer Reuben Selby. “At that point, it was time to … ” She smiles as if she’s bought a secret. “Just choose myself,” she says. “What always comes into my mind is Kim Cattrall,” she provides, paraphrasing a quote the actor gave to the Guardian that grew to become a preferred meme. “‘I don’t want to be anywhere, not even for an hour, where I’m not enjoying myself.’ That’s truly how I’ve been the last three years.”
For Williams, selecting herself means “a lot of quiet, a lot of reading, and writing, and yoga, and running, and exercise, and swimming, and cycling, and walking the dog. Walking the dog for, like, hours a day.” In different phrases, being in her physique. “Exactly, because then I know what I want. And that can be going out with my friends all weekend, or it can be a fun dinner in London where you miss your last train home, or it can be going to the cinema alone.” This summer season, it has meant going to Primavera Sound and seeing singer Ethel Cain play, having barbecues along with her pals and watching the World Cup in her native pub.
When I ask Williams what her profession ambitions at the moment are, a misty, faraway look comes over her. She does say her goals out loud, however she’d slightly not say them in print, she says. “My ambition is to work with people who have proven themselves to be really talented,” she says. “I’ve worked in the industry for quite a long time, and even though I love working with debut directors, there’s a stark difference in our experience now, which is noticeable. Working with people who are more experienced brings a different atmosphere on set.” She’s additionally been pouring her time into her manufacturing firm, Rapt. It has meant studying rather a lot of scripts. “I cannot tell you the amount of postpartum horrors that people are making,” she says. “Whenever there’s one great movie, you’ll get seven scripts like that on your desk.” She and her co-founder, Lowri Roberts, are having enjoyable writing their very own characteristic movie, too. “It’s a dark comedy. It’s a satire about the end of the world,” she says.
Williams has regularly been solid in darkish, dramatic roles: “But I don’t really think that’s how I am most of the time,” she says. “I think when I’m in bad situations, I’d be more likely to laugh than to cry. I don’t know if I’m really in the camp of ‘plan for the worst’. I’ve had periods of my life where I’ve been so overcome by the fear of what could go wrong that, particularly now, I’m more in a phase of ‘anything can be fixed’.”
Not that there’s a lot that wants fixing. She is courting and “so happy” about it, although she is coy when pressed in regards to the particulars. Has she been having fun with enjoying the sphere? “No! I’m in love,” she says, smirking. “That’s all I’ll say.” Does it really feel totally different from different instances she’s been in love? “Yes, which is good. There’s lots of laughter,” she says, laughing. The vibe this summer season, she says, has been “hot, in all senses of the word”. She grins. “I got myself a fan. I am a late adopter of the fan.” Before that, she says, she was “just sweating”. These days, she’s too busy having fun with herself a la Kim Cattrall to be continually bracing for the worst. “Life is actually quite fun, but we all torture ourselves over the agony of what could be.”
This web page was created programmatically, to learn the article in its unique location you may go to the hyperlink bellow:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/sep/06/maisie-williams-actor-interview-game-of-thrones-practical-magic-2
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