Maise Williams won all our hearts as the ferocious Arya Stark on the epic fantasy show Game of Thrones. She has done theatre and more films after the show. In a recent podcast, she shares how the trauma her father caused her affected her life. “What could make you mistreat your own children? What happened to you as a kid? Did you pull the legs off bugs? Did you learn all this?” she says. “That’s how I feel about him.”
Williams did not delve into the specifics of the incidents. But in her words, she was “indoctrinated into a child cult” by her father against her mother. “I, as a young child before the age of 8, had quite a traumatic relationship with my dad. Ever since I can remember, I’ve really struggled sleeping and I think a lot of the traumatic things that were happening I didn’t realize that they were wrong,” she says.
After a teacher at her school talked to her she began to realize what was going on around her. She says she never had breakfast because there was no food. Being in a cult, she did not want to believe her mother, who had “escaped” her father. “I still wanted to fight and say these things aren’t wrong, that you’re just trying to take me away from my dad.”
“I felt there was something inherently wrong with me, or us because we did lots of things wrong all the time, which is why you’d be mistreated,” Maisie shares. “Especially because it was a parent, and they’re supposed to like you.” She does not talk to her father anymore but she admits that he would “make a fascinating documentary.”
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Would really like to see that fascinating documentary.