Maisie Williams Gets Candid About Her Mental Health and Trying Not to Feel “Defeated”

• Game of Thrones actress Maisie Williams opened up about struggling with her mental health.
• She spoke with Fearne Cotton on the Happy Place podcast about how she just wants a normal life.

As Game of Thrones comes to an end (RIP to seven seasons of character development), Maisie Williams is reflecting on her career and her mental health. In an interview with Fearne Cotton on the Happy Place podcast, Maisie opened up about how she sometimes stays up at night thinking about how she hates herself, how she’s trying to move past it, and how she doesn’t want to be in the spotlight anymore.

The podcast started with Maisie saying, “Honestly, I want a normal life....I don’t want any of this crazy, crazy world because it’s not worth it.”

Then she went on to say that in the past year, she wasn’t pleased with herself and was “very sad.” She told Fearne, “In my own personal life, I think I just went through a lot of real revelations where I was like, ‘I’m not very happy doing this and pretending everything was fine.’” She later added:

“I think there was a period of time where I was very sad, and then I came out of that, and now it’s just really terrifying that you’re ever going to slip back into it. That’s still something that I’m really working on, because I think that’s really hard. It’s really hard to feel sad and not feel completely defeated by it.”

She also admitted there are nights when she stays up thinking about how she hates herself. She said, “I still lie in bed at, like, 11 o’clock at night telling myself all the things I hate about myself.”

That said, Maisie has definitely made progress with her mental health and self-esteem by being more “genuine.” She explained, “That wasn’t a public thing, but after going through that, now I’ve sort of tried to be a lot more genuine and it just becomes a lot more relaxing after that, I think. You just drop it all and that’s when you can really have fun.”

As of right now, the true queen of Thrones is focused on “dropping the act” and staying true to herself no matter what. “I think that’s definitely a first step,” she told Fearne. “Not trying to be who you want me to be right now in this moment...”