INTERVIEW

Meeting

MAISIE WILLIAMS​

Photo credit: Solent@Film

PUBLISHED 12 MARCH 2019 
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We all know her as the audacious and fiery Arya Stark from GAME OF THRONES (HBO 2011-) but the 21-year-old actress, entrepreneur and activist is so much more than that. From the early age of eight, Maisie dreamt of being the next Billy Elliot. However, growing up in a three-bed council estate, achieving “ordinary” grades and with her “grubby knees and crooked teeth” (as she told a Solent University audience), she knew she did not meet the typical requirements of becoming a professional dancer. “In times of immense pain”, she recalls, “I felt myself distinctively walking over to my mum’s CD player, cranking up the volume as loud as it would go to drown out the noise and let my body move to the beat”.  After enrolling in local dance classes and later auditioning for a performing arts school, her talent was quickly recognised and she was asked to join an acting agency. It was almost ten years to the date Maisie auditioned for the record-breaking and multi award-winning GAME OF THRONES. 

Last month, Maisie visited Solent University to talk to a student audience about her latest venture – social media networking app for creatives: Daisie. Along with attending the talk, I spoke with Maisie about the app, her roles and her advice for aspiring creatives and also got the chance to throw in a few bonus questions over lunch.

I have a voice and I like to use it.

Approaching the subject of why she is trying to help people break into the industry, Maisie recalled: “I am usually met with the opinion of ‘well it’s easy for you to say - you’ve got a career’”. Maisie explained how she created the Daisie app because of the issues she had seen in the industry. “At every opportunity, I felt like it was my duty to speak out about the injustices I could see; I have a voice and I like to use it”. The initial idea for Daisie stemmed from realising “no one had the connections they needed to get where they wanted and the key to success is collaboration. Actors are as only as strong as their writers”.  It is a refreshing concept. The app encourages talent and not popularity, “in a world where literally anyone can be famous, I want to inspire people to be talented instead”. The app rewards the creative for how hard they work and is “accumulative of how many times you interact with other artists”. A victim of cyberbullying herself - an experience she drew on for the TV movie CYBERBULLY (Channel 4 2015) – Maisie expresses wanting the Daisie platform to step away from the toxic nature of “likes” and “follows” and instead encourage users to trust in fact they are good enough and begin to positively create their own reputation.

In a world where literally anyone can be famous, I want to inspire people to be talented instead.

Over lunch Maisie was warm and welcoming and happy to answer questions Solent University students had regarding collaborations within the industry. Of course, you cannot have lunch with a GAME OF THRONES star without sneaking in a question about GAME OF THRONES. My burning question was “how did manage to play Arya blind?” Maisie said she had to wear hand-painted contact lenses which took up the space of her entire eyes and made everything seem smeary, but was actually pretty fun as it felt like being in your own little bubble. Three-o’clock came at it was time to say goodbye. No fuss, no drama and no diva qualities. I can hand on heart honestly say that Maisie Williams is a truly inspirational and utterly hilarious individual who’s words will always resonate with me, “refuse to hold yourself back and dare to think big… creativity comes from everywhere… we are connected, we are the future”.

Read our interview with Maisie below and scroll down for the full video.

THE INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW by Cait Dearlove & Lucy Maynard 

1. What was your initial inspiration for the app Daisie?

It’s always been a problem with the industry that I’ve been aware of and if I haven’t got the opportunities that I did then I would have been really stuck knowing how to get in. But in terms of the actual instigation, Dom was like we should make an app and I would have never thought of doing that on my own, but I guess between me understanding the industry and his initiative we made it work. 


2. How do you see the app progressing over the next 12 months?

If we can launch this second version and we get people who are on the app meeting new people collaborating and creating new content we’ll go and we’ll raise our series eight and then it means that you know whatever we have, how many users we have doing that at that one time it means we want to elevate it to more people. So I guess within the next 12 months that’s kind of where I see the company going. 


3. There are a lot of social media platforms, and a lot of specialised collaborative communities for artists already out there- what does Daisie offer that other platforms don’t?

We’ve been lucky enough to talk to a lot of founders of other companies that are similar to us and they’ve talked us through what they’ve learnt and what went well and what didn’t. In terms of how we see ourselves being quite different is that we try to inspire people to go from initial idea to the finish product. So rather than being an airbrushed final piece we like all of the mistakes that it takes in order to get there and all of the difficulties that you go through creating something so special and the time that it takes to build something like that and the people that you need. So we really want to highlight that part of the process which is something that is never really shown and not spoken about and we want to sort of like demystify all of that and let people see that it’s okay to make huge mistakes and for things not to get made for a really long time. It’s just the reality of the industry. 


4. What advice would you give to aspiring creatives to get the most out of using the app?

Networking, that’s the biggest tool within it and the most important tool. Working with people who are outside of your group, working with exciting people that you feel like are going to push you and doing things that are outside of your own comfort zone and applying it to be a part of something that you’re really interested in, but maybe haven’t done before and take that time to learn and grow as a creator. I think that is the most important thing and you know Daisie, we provide the tools but it’s up to you to use them and to get the most out of it. So you know there’s a lot of features and I think that given the right mind set it can really help people.  

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5.  At the moment the app is iPhone only, what was your reasoning for this?

When we started we just self-funded the company, so engineers are really expensive and it meant that we had to build something with the money that we had as quickly as we could because it’s expensive. So we were like we want to prove that there is a community, so lots of people do their connecting through their phones, so we’ll make an app and it was either between Android and IOS, because we couldn’t afford to do both. We went with an IOS app just to establish a community which we did really well. Since then we’ve got investors and we have money now so it’s meant we can build out the engineering team and actually have people working on IOS, Android and also the web app.  

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6. Early days, but what are your favourite projects you’ve seen so far?
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I’ve been opened up into the world of cartoons and drawing which has been really lovely and the original app was built for people to connect, but in terms of actually meeting up off line and collaborating it’s been something that we’ve seen a few times. There was a photographer who met up with a musician to shoot his album artwork and he released his EP with these images which was really wonderful. So it was nice to see that people were doing that even though the platform wasn’t necessarily built for that- so we hope to see more of that elevated in the future. 


7. We’re coming to the end of our degrees and as young creatives what advice would you give in addition to using the Daisie app?

Knowing what it is about you that is infectious and being able to convey that to people as soon as you meet them is so important. Being memorable and making an impact is so important. That’s true for so many different lines of work, not just as an actor, you have to do things to stand out, you can’t play by the rules and knowing that you’re good enough and because it’s not because how good you are its just who pipped you to the post and making sure you stay on that path to be that person.  


8. You’re a similar age to us, you must have friends at University? Do you think you’ve missed out in any way by not going?

I guess the social side of it. With my peers I’ve really missed that but in terms of being in a place of work I definitely still tried to learn even though I haven’t been in a place of learning. 


9. Finally, which of the roles you’ve played do you think you’ve learnt the most from and why?

I did a role in a film called THE FALLING and played a character called Lydia. The way that the movie approached young teenagers and how they are treated by grown-ups and how they rebel against that feeling of being repressed - that was really interesting. It was a strange time in my own life where I didn’t really feel like a child and I definitely wasn’t a grown up and [trying to understand] how to handle grownups who don’t know how to handle you. I always felt like people didn’t like me and it was just because they didn’t know how to take me because it was kind of strange that there was a child that was also a bit of a grown up. So I guess I learnt a lot from that character.