Maisie Williams Teases Arya’s “Scarier” Side, Carice van Houten Wants More Male Nudity, And Other Game of Thrones Tidbits
Winter Is Coming
We’ve less than two months to go until season four of Game of Thrones premieres, which means the trailers and interviews are rolling in for us to start freaking out over. (Oh, and did you hear we’re giving away a copy of season three?) Today we have Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner saying exciting things about what the upcoming season holds for their characters. Plus Carice van Houten joins the campaign for equal-opportunity nudity, and Kit Harington keeps trying to spoil an actor whose character was among season three’s dear departed.
Things have gotten tough for Arya and Sansa Stark since their dad got decapitated in the season one finale. That’ll happen. But Arya’s been going through her troubles out in the wilds of Westeros, while Sansa is trapped with the lions in King’s Landing. So far, said Williams to Wetpaint, “We’ve seen this kind of fun loving Arya who says it as it is and makes jokes, but this year she’s starting to change and we’re starting to see different sides to her. I don’t know how people are going to react. They might love it, they might hate it, but I think she’s becoming a lot more powerful in this world where women are getting bashed aside.”
Via Wetpaint, Williams:
“did hint that playing Arya this season was ‘more of a challenge’ than in the past, because while tapping into Arya’s sarcastic side came naturally — ‘that’s kind of my go-to thing when I get nervous anyway!’ — this season she had to channel a ‘scarier’ side of the character that’s ‘very different.'”
For Sansa’s part, she’ll also become more powerful, albeit politically: Turner notes that her character “begins to kind of manipulate the people who have done wrong to her in her past. She becomes a powerhouse character but in a very subtle way. It’s really good.”
“I feel like I’ve been waiting for a moment where I can manipulate the people that have come before me, so it was like I had been waiting for it for so long,” she continued. “It was a release.” That’s what I like to hear. For the last few seasons Sansa’s been learning to play the “game,” but since she’s living in very dangerous circumstances there’ve only been a few moments of semi-open defiance. Having read the books, I know what’s happening on paper. But Game of Thrones-the-show does a great job with depicting character development that often takes a back seat in George RR Martin‘s books (see: Margaery Tyrell, season one Jaime Lanister). So to know that the showrunners have chosen to focus on Sansa’s growing political acumen, already present in the books, is a big happy. Haters, step aside.
Into lighter territory, or as light as anything Red Wedding-related can be: Jon Snow actor Harington has apparently taken advantage of the death of his on-screen half-brother (unless you believe certain theories about Jon’s parentage…) to try and spoil Richard Madden, aka Robb Stark, about season four. “I spend a lot of time with Kit still,” said Madden, “and he’s like, ‘Oh my god, in episode 3, there’s a — ‘ and I’m like, ‘Don’t. Tell me. Anything. Now, for the first time ever, I can watch it and not know what’s happened.”
“I like to spring it on him,” added Harington in an interview with Zap2it, “or just tell him lies… He’s very good at spotting it, though.”
Hey, you’ve gotta take advantage when other people know nothing.
And to end on the best, most wonderful note: Carice van Houten, who plays the occasionally nude priestess Melisandre, thinks (as we do) that HBO needs to even up their nudity stakes a bit and give us more naked dudes:
“Hell yeah! Of course it has to be functional and it mostly is. But in general that’s what I like about the show, not the sex per se but the nudity is part of life.”
Apparently a nerve had been struck, because the actress continued: “We can see machine guns but we can’t see f**king – sorry – people? I really don’t get, I have to make a point here. Who sleeps with their bra on? I mean, sorry if that’s a Dutch approach but I think we need to get used to it. It’s part of life.”
One month, three weeks, and four days to go, my friends. We can make it.
(via: Zap2it, Wetpaint, Wetpaint, The Independent)
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