Maisie Williams: Doctor Who is a joy after seeing badly written female characters

Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams has told what a joy it was to work on BBC1’s Doctor Who after coming across a string of “badly written” female characters whose only job was to support the male star.

Williams, who plays Arya Stark in HBO’s fantasy epic, said: “I didn’t realise when I was younger that women were written so badly, but going further into this career I realised there are a lot of really bad characters, that it’s not common to come across females who aren’t just ‘the girlfriend’.

“You can’t pick and choose everything, but I hope to never have to play a character that is only there to benefit a male lead,” she told the new issue of Radio Times.

But in the same issue of the listings magazine, another British actor, Emily Blunt, said constantly discussing sexism in Hollywood could make the problem worse.

The Devil Wears Prada and Sicario star said: “Sure I’ve experienced sexism. But not that often any more.

“I do think I’m coming from a place of more confidence now because I’ve been doing this for 14 years and my opinion is more valued that it used to be.

“But I sometimes feel that we can exacerbate the problem by talking about it more. I think you can keep talking about it and create more and more of a stamp of divide. I think we need to do more and stop talking about it.”

Blunt, who apologised last month after joking that her newly acquired US citizenship was a “terrible mistake”, said initiatives like encouraging more female writers were the answer.

“We need to come up with practical solutions – like creating programmes to encourage female writers – rather than celebrating women who are already doing all right in Hollywood,” she said.

Bristol-born Williams will appear in two episodes of Doctor Who, beginning this Saturday, with The Girl Who Died, in which the Doctor and Clara (Jenna Coleman) must train a useless band of Vikings to defend themselves against the galaxy’s most deadly army. It will be followed a week later by The Girl Who Lived.

Williams said: “Peter [Capaldi] has been such a joy to work with. My brother was so excited when he heard I got the part, as was I. He’s a wonderful, wonderful actor and I couldn’t wait to meet him. He totally lived up to my expectations and I love that!”

Williams was approached to play a character called Ashildr, a name derived from Old Norse which means “battle god”.

Showrunner Steven Moffat described this instalment, penned by Being Human’s Jamie Mathieson, as “the day when the Doctor remembers where he’s seen his own face before”.

Williams said: “I didn’t know much about it, but I knew they were introducing a new character to work closely with the Doctor.

“I’d got through [reading] the second episode and absolutely loved it! I was going to do a tape but ran out of time because I was in America shooting another film, so my agent worked really hard and sent over lots of clips and videos – they liked them and gave me the role.”

Earlier this year Williams also took part in the Channel 4 documentary Cyberbully, and says being famous can be “scary, but it’s what you have to do”.

She added: “I’ve stopped reading what people think now. It’s easy for people to have an opinion online when they don’t realise that there’s actually Maisie Williams who’s reading that and crying.”