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She played Arya Stark in the groundbreaking HBO series Game of Thrones, and Maisie Williams has revealed if she’d ever consider returning to the GoT universe. “Absolutely,” she tells StyleCaster. “It’s such a rich universe. One day I would love to.”
There are quite a lot of similarities between the role that launched her career and the one she and I are speaking about today. Arya was rebellious, fiercely independent, and a survivor of unspeakable trauma.
Now, in AppleTV’s 10-episode series The New Look, Williams plays Catherine Dior, the beloved younger sister of and muse to the fashion designer Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn). Catherine was literally rebellious; she joined French Resistance in 1941 during the Nazi occupation of Paris. She did things her way; marrying late at 36 when the average age for women was 21. Catherine is also a survivor of unspeakable trauma.
In 1944, the 26-year-old was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, and deported to Ravensbrück, an all-women concentration camp 56 miles north of Berlin. She was later transferred to the military prison of Torgau where she worked in an explosives production line. Catherine was liberated by US and Soviet forces a year later in April 1945.
The show centers on her brother Christian’s rise to prominence as an innovative designer who offered France hope while also putting Coco Chanel’s reign as the world’s most famous designer in jeopardy. Chanel, a well-documented Nazi sympathizer and informer, is played by Juliette Binoche. Catherine’s presence—even when she’s imprisoned—is felt acutely through her brother Christian’s longing and worry.
Much of what informed Williams about her character was Justine Picardie’s Miss Dior biography, as Catherine never recorded what would have been unimaginable horrors at the hands of the Nazis. But channeling that suffering is exactly what an actor does.
“I think with every emotion that we feel, we tie it to a poignant part in our own lives,” she says. “I think that whether those actual real-life situations are comparable in any way to the characters that we play, we still understand how it feels to be heartbroken or lonely or hopeless.”
Empathy is one thing; changing one’s physicality is another. To accurately portray an emaciated Catherine after her liberation from the labor camp, Williams lost about 26 pounds over a grueling—but closely medically monitored—two months.
“I wanted to embody that change where you become this ghost that no one can even recognize anymore,” Williams explains. Her physical transformation was important to her relationship with Mendelsohn, too.
“He had seen me in my gorgeous wig and my gorgeous outfit, cycling my bike around Paris, and then I didn’t see him for two months,” she recalled. “I had shaved my head on camera, I had lost a lot of weight, and had just stopped caring for myself in ways that I usually like to, so when I walked on set with Ben and Julia Ducournau, our director for those episodes, I could tell that everyone around me had a strong reaction to it. I think that was just something I wanted to feel.”
The New Look is available to stream on AppleTV+. The first three episodes drop on February 14 and will then air episodically.
Drawing on the Dior archives and extensive research, Justine Picardie’s Miss Dior is the long-overdue restoration of Catherine Dior’s life. The siblings’ stories are profoundly intertwined: in Occupied France, as Christian honed his couture skills, Catherine dedicated herself to the Resistance, ultimately being captured by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbruck, the only Nazi camp solely for women.
Seeking to trace Catherine’s story as well as her influence on her brother, Picardie traveled to the significant places of Catherine’s life, including Les Rhumbs, the Dior family villa with its magnificent gardens; the House of Dior in Paris; and La Colle Noire, Christian’s chateâu that he bequeathed to his sister.
