Throughout the history of Game of Thrones, the HBO series delivered audiences all manner of love scenes and romantic relationships, but based on her age and her narrative trajectory, Maisie Williams’ Arya Stark was rarely depicted as exploring any of those connections, resulting in Williams herself believing her character to be queer. While she had a number of relationships with men, many of them were playfully antagonistic, though the final season of the fantasy series saw Arya have a love scene with Joe Dempsie’s Gendry Baratheon, which took not only audiences by surprise, but also Williams by surprise as well.
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“The first time that I was surprised by Arya I guess was probably in the final series where she whips off her clothes and sleeps with Gendry,” Williams shared with Teen Vogue. “I thought that Arya was queer, you know? So… yeah. That was a surprise.”
Early on in the series, Arya proved to be more interested in mastering a sword than exploring future romances like her sister Sansa, with the Season 1 finale seeing her get her hair cut off to go on the run as a boy so she wouldn’t be executed following the killing of her father. Over subsequent seasons, fans would go on to speculate that the character could be queer or genderfluid, with her exploits seeing her go against the gendered expectations of Westeros.
Interestingly, Williams opened up earlier this year about how her on-screen role complicated her own gender identity, as she felt audiences expected her to embrace the “tomboy” persona of Arya as opposed to being allowed to explore her own womanhood.
“I think that when I started becoming a woman, I resented Arya because I couldn’t express who I was becoming,” Williams revealed to GQ UK. “And then I also resented my body, because it wasn’t aligned with the piece of me that the world celebrated.”
Regardless of her gender identity and sexual orientation, Arya has become one of the most popular characters in the series, leaving audiences to wonder if Williams could ever reprise her role.
“I’m not saying it would never happen, but I’m also not saying it in this interview so that everyone goes…’The spinoff! It’s coming!’ Because it’s not,” Williams joked with Variety. “It has to be the right time and the right people … It has to be right in the context of all the other spinoffs and the universe of Game of Thrones. It has to be the right time for me.”
Stay tuned for details on the future of the Game of Thrones franchise.
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