Arya Stark would definitely approve. “Game of Thrones” star Maisie Williams has launched production company Daisy Chain Productions with actor Bill Milner and producer Dom Santry, ScreenDaily reports. The company’s goal is to produce “UK projects with a focus on youth and talent development.”
Daisy Chain’s first project is Mark Lobatto’s short film “Stealing Silver,” set to make its debut later this month at the Savannah International Film Festival. Williams stars as a struggling young woman who discovers something unexpected about her neighbor (Ronald Pickup, “The Crown”).
Before beginning Daisy Chain, Williams, Milner, and Santry previously collaborated on the Netflix sci-fi film “iBoy.” Williams and Milner starred and Santry served as a camera operator.
“I hope to give other creatives the opportunities that I was lucky enough to receive at the beginning of my career,” Williams said of the new company. “I have previously had the joy of working with female directors on a number of occasions. The industry is moving and I couldn’t be more excited for my future within it.”
“We are really looking forward to supporting and championing up-and-coming, exciting talent both here in the UK and also across the globe,” commented Milner. “The chance to give creatives of all backgrounds an opportunity to have their talents seen and their stories heard is very special and to do that whilst creating great art makes it all the more sweeter.”
Starting her own production company and having a say in the types of projects that get developed are smart moves for Williams, who has been vocal about her frustrations about the lack of substantial female roles. “There are a lot of roles that come in that are ‘the girlfriend’ or ‘the hot piece’ in a movie or TV series,” she has said. “It will say ‘Derek: intelligent, good with kids, funny, really good at this’ and then it will say ‘Sandra: hot in a sort of cute way’ — and that’s all you get. That’s the way your character is described, so going into an audition you are channeling ‘hot,’ which isn’t like a person, that’s not who a person is.”
Williams has played the badass Arya Stark on “Game of Thrones” since the show’s 2011 debut. The seventh season of the fantasy-adventure HBO series concluded in August. Its eighth and final season is expected to air sometime in 2018. Carol Morley’s “The Falling” and “Doctor Who” are among Williams’ other credits. Next, you can catch her alongside Elle Fanning in Haifaa al-Mansour’s “Mary Shelley,” a biopic about the titular “Frankenstein” writer, and as Rahne Sinclair/Wolfsbane in next year’s “X-Men: The New Mutants.”
