Sophie Turner, and Maisie Williams, who plays Sansa Stark and Arya Stark respectively might have had some feelings of animosity ruin their familial relationship during the Game of Thrones series, but in real life, they are the best of friends.
Being on a show that brought us; resurrections, premonitions, psychics travelling through time, a large army of undead men, a killer shadow baby, a hot fireproof queen, regular dragons, a zombie dragon and let’s not forget the incest, Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams have bonded over all the challenges it took to play their awesome characters.
In 2009, at a reading for the role of the Stark sister, a 12-year-old Maisie Williams saw a 13-year-old Sophie Turner for the first time and from then grew a deep and uncanny connection.
Now 23 years old, Turner said: “We were pretty much best friends from that second on.”
On how their relationship affected their work, Turner said: “We’re a nightmare to work with. If you’re working with your best friend, you will never get any work done, ever. Anytime we tried to be serious about anything, it’s just the hardest thing in the world. I think they really regretted putting us in scenes together. It was difficult.”
Author of Game of Thrones books, George R.R Martins described the roles of the characters both Turner and Williams were to play. He noted that “when we met Sansa at the beginning of the book and show, she was a happy, somewhat smug occupant of a cloistered and fluffy world – a Disney princess destined to be thrown into a sea of horrors.”
Arya Stark was to be the opposite. She was “a girl who chafes at the roles she was being pushed into, who didn’t want to sew, who wanted to fight with a sword… who liked hunting and wrestling in the mud.”
On her feelings playing Arya Stark, Williams said she truly enjoyed bloodiest moments. She said “You can feel the adrenaline. It feels incredible because it’s all pretend, it doesn’t matter. Btu when else do you get to do that? There was this shot we did at the end of Season Three when I’m stabbing the guy in the neck. They got me a sandbag and a fake knife, and they had blood going and they were just like, ‘Stab! Just go for it.’ my God! You can feel ‘Ahhhh!’ It was good.”
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