Game of Thrones icon Maisie Williams looks very different after shedding 26lbs for a new TV role.
The Arya Stark actress is set to play Catherine Dior, the younger sister of fashion house mogul Christian Dior, in The New Look. But getting into shape for the job proved so difficult it led to “nightmares” and “sleep paralysis”. Maisie explained all in an interview, telling Harper’s Bazaar that while medical professionals supervised her weight loss, she wasn’t eating much.
She explained: “I was eating very little, meditating all the time, burning candles and incense in my apartment. I had to be up at 4am to start sweating. The night before, at about seven or 8pm, I was allowed to have something salty and dehydrating – some smoked salmon and a tiny glass of wine.”
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Maisie then took a “boiling hot bath with lots of salts in it” to ease the fluid out of her body, before she “levitated to bed and slept for maybe three hours”. Upon waking, she was allowed a “handful of nuts” – and she felt “restricted” throughout the experience.
(Image: Apple TV+)
It’s not the first time she’s had to transform physically for a role, because her Game of Thrones character needed her to “build different muscles”. But to play Catherine, the role “took over what I’m eating and how I’m moving and sleeping and thinking,” she said.
In Game of Thrones, the actress was forced to “hide” her body as she began to mature, explaining to Vogue at the time: “Around season two or three, my body started to mature and I started to become a woman. I had to have really short hair, and they’d constantly cover me in dirt and shade my nose so it looked really broad and I looked really manly.
(Image: Corbis via Getty Images)
“They’d also put this strap across my chest to flatten any growth that had started and that just felt horrible for six months of the year, and I felt kind of ashamed for a while.”
But the new role takes things even further – Maisie said she felt like a “marble inside a bottle” when she woke up, having nightmares related to her character. Catherine was in the French resistance during WWII, which haunted her dreams. She said: “There was a lot of feeling restricted, almost like sleep paralysis, dreams of being trapped and attacked, and horrible visions of men in uniform.
“Every day of filming was a reminder that we were portraying a story of the horrors that humans are capable of inflicting on one another, but also the magic and the hope and the love.” Now that story will be translated into a 10 episode series airing on AppleTV+.
(Image: Getty Images for Apple TV+)
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Maisie is set to star alongside Ben Mendelsohn, Glenn Close and Juliette Binoche in the miniseries. Based on the book Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture, the new series explores how Catherine was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in 1944. She spent nearly a year in a concentration camp in Germany before being released in 1945.
She spent time being forced to work at various German camps and factories but was eventually awarded several medals in recognition of her bravery. Catherine even ended up with the famous Miss Dior perfume named after her. She lived until June 2008, helping to open the Christian Dior museum in Granville, Normandy.
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
