“I still try and live as normal a life as I can. If you want to be an actor and live a glitzy lifestyle then you can hire a bodyguard whenever you go to a music festival. You can do that if you want to.” Suffice to say, that’s not the kind of actor Maisie Williams wants to be. You’d be more likely to find the 19-year-old Game of Thrones prodigy in the mixer at Boomtown caked in glitter than you would at Coachella, cowering under oversized sunglasses and surrounded by heavy set security. Grounded: that’s the first word that springs to mind when you meet her.

While Williams’ 4.5million Instagram followers attest to the wide extent of her (sometimes disturbingly obsessive) fandom, she wears the pressures of media scrutiny and teenage fame remarkably lightly. An endearing bemusement at her own popularity is a recurring theme throughout our conversation. Even those legions of Insta-followers are met with self-deprecating disbelief: “It’s weird… my photos aren’t any better than anyone else’s. They’re terrible!”

Raw they might be, but it’s precisely that kind of unvarnished candour that’s made her a rm fan favourite on GoT — which is saying something given the stratospheric popularity of the show. As pint-sized harbinger of death Arya Stark, Williams has been slaughtering and avenging in her inimitable headstrong style for six seasons, and she’s about to wrap filming the seventh.

As is often the case with actors who start young, it all might never have happened for Williams, had she not caught the attention of an agent in her hometown of Bristol. She was discovered during a dance performance to H2o ft. Platnum’s bassline classic, “What’s It Gonna Be?” at a talent contest — a song which evokes memories of a Proustian potency should she ever hear it these days in the club. Only 11 years old at the time, and with her heart set on being a dancer rather than an actress, Williams won the role of Arya at the second audition she ever attended.

A dream come true for any burgeoning performer, sure. But whereas most of us are afforded the advantage of navigating the awkward path through adolescence in private, Williams’ teenage years were played out (at least in one respect) very much in front of the camera. I wonder if she ever yearns for a more conventional youth. “It’s not something I’m really aware of because I’ve never really known anything else,” she reasons. “It’s strange because a lot of people would always say to me when I was younger, ‘Don’t change! Don’t forget who you are.’ And I understand what they meant by that but… my personality has taken many different shapes as I’ve grown up, as it does for every teenager. They go through a phase of this and then they go through a phase of that. Doing that in the public eye is really weird because people think they know you and that you’re being different to the girl that they know.”