Maisie Williams

Maisie Williams was cast in Game of Thrones with no previous credits and played Arya Stark from 2011 to 2019, which is to say she grew up in public, in armour, inside an enormous production. Two Emmy nominations came out of it.

Arya made her and also fixed an image: small, watchful, underestimated, dangerous. Almost everything since has looked like a deliberate campaign against that image. The Falling, made while the show was still running, is a strange English film about a wave of hysteria in a girls' school, and she is unnervingly good in it.

Since 2019 she has taken the roles that put the most distance between herself and Westeros: Rahne Sinclair in The New Mutants, the horror film The Owners, the punk figure Jordan in Pistol, a biopic about the Sex Pistols, and Catherine Dior in The New Look, which is the most adult work she has done and the least like anything else on the list.

The genre and animation credits fill the gaps: Goona in Early Man, Lucy in iBoy, Cammie MacCloud across gen:LOCK, Isabel Baxter in Mary Shelley, Sylvia in The Luckiest Man in America. Two 2026 films are listed with no character attached, one of them a Practical Magic sequel. She is twenty-nine and fifteen years into a career, which is a strange place to be standing.