Maisie Williams revealed she had a “traumatic” childhood, which was fueled by her father’s behavior.
“As a young child before the age of 8, I had a traumatic relationship with my father,” the “Game of Thrones” actress said on Monday’s episode of the podcast “The Diary of a CEO.”
“[That relationship] really took up a big part of my childhood. Ever since I can remember I really struggled with sleep, and I think a lot of the traumatic things that happened I didn’t realize they were wrong,” she went on to host Steven Bartlett.
The former child actress, who is now 25, said she felt estranged from her peers growing up because of her experiences.
“I looked around at other kids and wondered, why don’t they seem to understand this pain, fear, or anxiety? Where does this joy come from – when will it come for me?’”
During the interview, the “Pistols” star described her childhood as someone who “felt very deeply compared to other people.”
While Williams didn’t go into detail about specific events surrounding her father because “it affects my siblings and my entire family,” she did share that her mother, Hilary Pitt Frances, was able to “escape” her father when the TV star was just four months old.
“It was bad before that,” noted Williams, the youngest of her four siblings.
Despite reticence in the details, she described the moment a teacher asked her about her life at home, planting the seed in her head that something was wrong.
When she was just 8 years old, her teacher asked her if she was hungry, which she said she was. When the teacher further asked if she had breakfast, she said no because “we just didn’t have breakfast”.
Williams eventually revealed to the teacher that she and her siblings usually didn’t eat anything in the morning.
Breaking into tears during the interview, Williams said: “They asked the right questions. I had so many people who loved and cared about me so much, but I never got the right questions where I could really say what was going on with me. hand wash.”
After the exchange with her teacher, Williams’ mother came to school with her siblings.
“It was really hard because I still wanted to fight and say, ‘No! These things aren’t bad! You’re trying to take me away from my father and that’s wrong!’ Because I was indoctrinated in a way.”
Williams said she felt like her ‘whole world was upside down’ that day, sharing that while it felt good to be away from her father, she knew it felt against everything she ‘knew was true’ .
The actress described her family situation as something of a “cult” and expressed a shift in perspective on her father and childhood years later, and a desire to stop taking things that happened in her life personally.
“If I hadn’t been there, it would have been someone else. It’s not because there’s anything wrong with me that these things happened when I was a kid.”