Updated

Updated · The Guardian · Sep 6

Maisie Williams Says Life Improved Post-2023 as 29-Year-Old Opens Up on Trauma and New Love

Updated

Updated · The Guardian · Sep 6

Maisie Williams Says Life Improved Post-2023 as 29-Year-Old Opens Up on Trauma and New Love

Q: After escaping childhood trauma and child stardom, what secret dark comedy project is Maisie Williams quietly brewing next?

Maisie Williams says the next project she is quietly developing is a dark-comedy feature she is writing with her production-company co-founder. She has not disclosed the title, plot or timetable, so the “secret” part remains just that: it is known only as a dark comedy in active development through her own production banner. In interviews tied to *Practical Magic 2*, Williams said she wants to keep building projects as a producer while also working with more experienced filmmakers. The project fits the broader reset she has described since speaking publicly in 2022 about childhood trauma and the pressures of growing up in *Game of Thrones*. She has said she is now in a much healthier place personally and is focusing on reading, writing, producing and choosing work more deliberately. So, the factual answer is that Williams is brewing an as-yet-untitled dark-comedy feature co-written with her co-founder, rather than a publicly announced new acting vehicle.

Q: Why did a failed £16 Etsy spell ironically foreshadow Maisie Williams' most magical on-screen transformation yet?

The irony is that the cheap spell failed to win Maisie Williams the role she wanted, yet it prefigured her landing a far more fitting part: playing a witch in *Practical Magic 2*. Williams said she once paid about £16.50 to an Etsy witch to “manifest” a movie role and repeated the prescribed words nightly, but “it didn’t work.” That experience briefly put her off witchcraft. Years later, however, she was cast without any supernatural help as Antonia Owens, the youngest daughter of Sandra Bullock’s Sally Owens in the sequel to the 1998 cult film. That makes the episode feel like an accidental foreshadowing. The spell failed in its literal aim, but Williams ultimately ended up in one of the most overtly magical roles of her career, joining the Owens family alongside Bullock, Nicole Kidman and Joey King. In interviews, she has leaned into that irony, even joking that because she got *Practical Magic 2* “on [her] own,” maybe she is the witch. The parallel is even sharper because her character begins as a skeptic. Antonia is a neuroscience student who initially rejects spirituality and magic before learning that science and magic can coexist. That mirrors Williams’s real-life shift from dabbling in mystical ideas to treating them more lightly and skeptically. So the failed Etsy spell foreshadowed her transformation not because it worked, but because it pointed, unexpectedly, toward the role that would make her most visibly “magical” on screen.

3 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Sep 6

Post-2023, Maisie Williams said “every day has been getting better,” describing a turn toward friends, quiet routines and “choos[ing] myself” after a traumatic childhood and a difficult early 20s.
The 29-year-old said speaking publicly in 2022 about her father and childhood fear helped free her from it, after years in which even close friends and partners did not know the full story.
Williams also said the end of Game of Thrones, delayed adolescence, Covid and an industry strike made the first half of her 20s “hell,” even as early fame from the HBO hit shaped her career and emotional life.
Now she says she is “in love” and “so happy,” while balancing acting with her production company and preparing to appear in Practical Magic 2 alongside Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman.
Her account frames a broader shift from bracing for pain to embracing ordinary pleasure, with Williams saying she no longer wants to spend even an hour where she is not enjoying herself.