A day in the life of one of young Hollywood’s most recognisable stars must be all chauffeurs and jumping from party to party, right? Not so for Maisie Williams, whose schedule for the day ahead involves doing her accounts and cleaning up after a dog with an upset tummy. Oh, the glamour!
Still, that’s exactly how Williams needs things to be. "I love it here so much, and I think that the exciting parts of my life can only be exciting if I have lived a kind of more normal life for the rest of the time," says Williams, gesturing around the office ("A real mess!") of her home in the countryside south of London. Too much "suitcase to suitcase, hotel room to fancy restaurant, to aeroplane, to new city, to PR trip to Ibiza or whatever, can just suck the fun out of it," she tells me.
Williams is not just tolerant of the ordinary, but grateful for the "cyclical mundanity" of walking the dog, taking the bins out, doing laundry. "I'm so lucky that I get to have a portion of my life that is not like that. But I think it's only enjoyable because I also feel the throes of boredom now and then. I think that's when you really percolate on life," she says. Williams, a lively and open chit-chatterer, has always craved normality. "But what even is normal, right?"
Certainly, her teenage years were very much not normal. She was 12 and a confessed goofy kid with a propensity to daydream when HBO’s cultural juggernaut Game of Thrones started, in which she played kickass fan favourite Arya Stark for all eight seasons. A global phenomenon, GOT catapulted Williams (along with the rest of the cast, and notably her on-screen siblings Sophie Turner, Kit Harington and Richard Madden) to instant, big-league fame.
Williams returned to school after filming the first three seasons. I tell her that must have been weird. It was certainly a gear shift, she says. "On one hand, you're working with adults, and you're being paid for a job, but on the other, you're part of a school classroom where a teacher is trying to navigate the group as a whole. It's just very hard for a small child to jump between the two." Sweetly, she says the first time she felt famous was when Chloé sent her a pair of sunglasses, a cute anecdote that reminds you quite how young she was.
Crazy as the GOT experience must have been, Williams is one of the lucky ones to emerge from the child-star grinder intact. Her non-famous friends keep her grounded but are also "supportive of the chaos of celebrity". Fame can be scary, she admits—"Being perceived is terrifying!"—and she treats social media (she has over 10 million followers on Instagram and TikTok) with caution, comparing it to a monster in the garden ("I'll feed you but that’s it, you can't come in the house"). She has navigated fame and fandom "clunkily", she says. "There are times when it comes freely, and there are times when you don't quite nail it. But I think it’s just intuition."
Does she feel like she has made mistakes in the past? "So many! But the thing is, because I don't give them the power to upset me, they don't even feel like mistakes anymore," she says. Like? "Things I wish I hadn't said, there are things I wish I hadn't worn. Friends I wish I kept in touch with or had not kept in touch with. Times I should have made a decision sooner, or times that I made a decision too quickly. [But] so many people are going to judge you for your actions, so maybe be nice to yourself," she says. "People are going to talk no matter what, so you might as well not hate on your own life."
The first 10 years of Williams's career were non-stop (the enforced COVID hiatus offered her a moment to take stock). Choices post-GOT have been varied, from a Marvel superhero flick (The New Mutants) to a teen rom com (Then Came You) and her turn as 1970s punk-scene icon and Vivienne Westwood muse Jordan in the Sex Pistols bio-series Pistol. This year, there’s been the heart-tugging Irish drama 500 Miles alongside Bill Nighy, and, although she can’t say much about it, a gothic horror she’s producing as well as starring in.
The more chaotic part of her life is about to crank up a gear again with the release of Practical Magic 2. Picking up several years after the original was set, the sequel sees Sally’s (Sandra Bullock) children, Antonia (Williams) and Kylie (Joey King), now in their twenties, "with no recollection that magic ever existed". Pragmatic Antonia is a neurosurgeon in training, whose "journey is about accepting magic and medicine as part of her life," Williams tells me. The key players of the original cast return, including Bullock and Nicole Kidman ("the last of the real movie stars") as the witchy Owens sisters, as does the love curse and that iconic turret-and-white-picket Gothic villa.
Williams is bursting with affection and admiration for her co-stars. King is "a deeply funny, silly person. [Working with her] just made the whole thing a lot more freeing." Arm-in-arm pap shots and the pair’s social media pages show a duo who clearly have a blast together. Last summer they had a night of karaoke in wigs, followed by a morning-after hangover dance (duly posted to TikTok by King).
Shortly after Williams signed on to the project, she got a text from Bullock saying, "Hey, it's your mother here," welcoming her and telling her she was excited to dive into the world of Practical Magic with her. There is a line in the film where one character says there is no magic stronger than sisterhood. "I do believe that, and think it is such a beautiful message," says Williams. "I wouldn't have made it through this industry without sisterhood and without friendships with other female co-stars or directors, and also, my friends are not in the industry."
Bullock, Kidman, Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest really took King and Williams under their wing. "It was so beautiful, it was like a dream," Williams says. She tells me that her favourite memories of being on set are "when we were just having girly gossip chats about love and friendships and sex and the world. I cherish that the most. It was just girls hanging out, chatting," she says. There was even a sleepover at "Sandy's", complete with midnight margaritas.
Fashion—which Williams has a huge respect for and a genuine interest in—is not only a huge source of power for an actor but also a powerful tool she’s utilised to help her "graduate from child actor to adult actor". She is equally at home in Dior couture (Williams played Christian Dior’s younger sister Catherine in the Apple TV+ show The New Look), Thom Browne, Margiela and Miu Miu as she is wearing independent labels like Talia Byer.
She is clearly someone who "gets" fashion and doesn’t dress like a woman trying to fast-forward her age, but rather like a typical 20-something—albeit one with access to custom pieces. When we talk, she is wearing a thrifted French Connection baby tee with "Cool as FCUK" emblazoned on the front.
Williams has clearly been having fun with the fashion part of the Practical Magic 2 press tour, and has eschewed working with a tried-and-tested Hollywood stylist for her friend, Dino Bonačić. It’s clearly paying off; vintage Gucci plum tailoring, pleasingly witchy Lili Curia boots, floral organza Cecilie Bahnsen, deconstructed Maison Margiela and a smattering of eBay-sourced accessories have all been on the agenda.
As for method dressing? "A little bit!", says Williams, who adds that for her, it’s less about doing playbook gothic and more about "taking inspiration from like the late '90s [and from] Sandra and Nicole at the time; the things that they were dressing in." True to this sentiment, at the London premiere a couple of weeks after we spoke, Williams wore a custom Ellie Misner look inspired by Bullock's dress to promote Forces of Nature in 1999.
Fashion aside, it's an apt time for Practical Magic to return, not least because of 2026's intensified interest in all things woo-woo. Williams herself has been known to dabble in it; she has used an Etsy witch, consults Tarot cards, attends esoteric readings and breaks off mid-sentence when the time is 11:11 to excitedly exclaim, "Witchy! Let’s make a wish!" (This is probably the only instance when a celebrity suddenly observing the time mid-interview isn't a heavy-handed hint to wrap up). This summer, she was papped leaving the Gypsi Tea Room psychic in West Hollywood.
"I think there's a real rise of divine feminine power," Williams observes. "And yeah, I'm here for it. When the word 'witch' is fired out as an insult, it’s usually because very powerful women and groups of powerful women … are a threat to the patriarchy." Now "feels like a time to, you know, get more in touch with your intuition and to explore the synchronicities and the power that women have in groups; the power of gossip and information, of knowledge and knowing."
Criticism of the esoteric can be "a bit misogynistic," she adds. "I think unlocking answers can happen in all kinds of ways. And that's all we're searching for."
Williams turns 30 next year, which she says she's excited about. "But I'm more excited to turn 40. I'm more excited to have 50. I just feel like life is gonna make more sense." For a long, long time, she has "yearned for people to see me as a grown-up," she says, admitting, "I don’t know if that’s going to come until I really do have grey hair." (Thanks to childhood fame plus naturally youthful looks, she was ID’d to see a 15-certificate film recently, she tells me, laughing).
She talks with the wisdom of someone who’s had to grow up fast, but she says, "I don't have it all figured out. I'm also not naive enough to think that that same doesn't apply to everyone. No one's really got it figured out! And even when you do have it figured out, life will throw something at you that is completely unprecedented. I think that being okay with uncertainty is very liberating."
Photographer: Melanie Rodriguez
Stylist: Rachel Bakewell
Hair Stylist: Tomi Roppongi at Julian Watson Agency
Makeup Artist: Bari Khalique
Manicurist: Michelle Class at LMC
Editor-in-Chief: Jane McFarland
Art Director: Natalia Sztyk
Executive Director, Entertainment: Jessica Baker
Writer: Laura Jordan
Video: Natasha Wilson
Photography Assistant: Paul Hydge and Daiki Tajima
Styling Assistant: Lorna Lane
Production: Town Productions