Andor’s Faye Marsay Shares Difference Between Working in Star Wars and Game of Thrones

Star Wars: Andor is currently nine episodes deep on Disney+ and it features Faye Marsay as Vel Sartha, a member of the Rebellion who was recently revealed to be the cousin of Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly). If Marsay looks familiar, that’s because she was previously on another popular television show: Game of Thrones. Marsay appeared as The Waif in 11 episodes throughout the show’s fifth and sixth seasons before being killed by Arya Stark (Maisie Williams). During a recent chat with /Film, Marsay was asked if she felt more pressure joining Game of Thrones during the height of its popularity or joining a big franchise like Star Wars in a new project. 

“Yes, that small show, yeah,” Marsay joked about Game of Thrones. “With Game of Thrones, I don’t know what it was about that, I just remained cool, because it was something that was so much bigger than me. What I was being asked to do was the thing that I like doing. If you minimize your role down, and you don’t worry about all the other sort of noise around it, you just kind of concentrate on what you’re being asked to do, which is quite… It’s not simple, but what my job is, is to say somebody else’s words convincingly and create a character that means something to the script, to the way the writer wrote it, and to the people who are watching it.”

She continued, “If you take all the noise out of it, I found Game of Thrones a much easier job than one would think. Given that, at the time, it was just blowing up, and given the storyline I had with the character, with Maisie [Williams], who was the most loved character pretty much on the show at that point, and I acted horrible to. So that was hard. But I think I probably felt more pressure starting a new huge mammoth Star Wars TV thing in which that I was going to be one of the sort of main-ish roles. Did I answer that correctly?”

How Did Matt Smith Feel About Doctor Who Versus House of the Dragon?

Marsay isn’t the only actor to play in Westeros in addition to other major franchises. The Game of Thrones spin-off, House of the Dragon, has featured Matt Smith as Daemon Targaryen. Of course, he also played The Eleventh Doctor on Doctor Who from 2010 to 2013. Recently, he admitted that stepping into the BBC franchise was a whole lot harder than joining the HBO show. 

“The pressure that came with Doctor Who is extraordinary,” Smith told the Los Angeles Times. “On this, you’re sharing it with like 10 other actors. Doctor Who is Doctor Who, Hamlet is Hamlet, you know? I was 26 [when I was cast] and I don’t know if I’ll ever feel pressure like that again. In Britain, anyway, the focus on that job is enormous. [House of the Dragon] is a huge global franchise, or so they tell me, but I just go to work in a studio in Watford and try to get the lines in the right order. I think that everyone who leaves Doctor Who will forever miss Doctor Who because it doesn’t get any better. He is the most glorious character. To live with the idea of being able to time travel is f-ing amazing. It’s limitless. It’s a tough part to leave.”

Andor is now streaming exclusively on Disney+. All of Game of Thrones and the first season of House of the Dragon are streaming on HBO Max.