Maisie Williams has been showing off her acting skills on Game of Thrones since 2011, but some may say her acting has never been better than it was during her recent April Fool's Day visit to The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Things were going smoothly enough when Fallon asked Williams to say anything that she could about the final season, and then she uttered these words:
During shooting, the final days were really emotional, saying goodbye to all of the cast. When I found out that Arya died in, like, the second episode...
At this point, Maisie Williams' eyes grew to the size of Drogon's, and she stopped talking altogether. In fact, the entire Tonight Show studio was bereft of any noise in that moment, with seemingly 90% of the audience gasping after hearing of Arya's (presumably false) demise. Jimmy Fallon didn't sell the moment quite as well – "What? Are you kidding me?" – but his bemused concern definitely didn't derail the bit.
That might have been the moment in the clip where shoddier pranksters would have pulled the wool back and yelled, "Gotcha!" But Maisie Williams is no shoddy prankster. She shakily inquired about whether or not the taping was live, and confirmed they could edit that comment out. And when Jimmy Fallon attempted to reset the moment to move past the pregnant pauses, Williams apologized and ran off behind the set's curtains.
Truthfully, this was where things genuinely felt like they'd gotten away from Jimmy Fallon and the Tonight Show team. The audience was completely silent as she ran off, and the main camera initially stayed locked on both Fallon's desk and the empty chair. It's weirder than one might think to see a lone host set so far off the center of the frame.
Alas, the "truth" soon got revealed, with Maisie Williams popping back out for the big "April Fool's!" reveal. Not nice, guys! Not nice at all!
Naturally, because this is Game of Thrones, whose showrunners have kept nearly all of the Season 8 details under multiple levels of locks and keys, some fans online (both in the video's comments and on social media) are positing the notion that Maisie Williams and The Tonight Show are bamboozling fans with a double-reverse spoiler that could actually end up coming true.
The logic there, which admittedly isn't the most scientifically square, is that if Maisie Williams let it slip on any other day that Arya dies in Episode 2 of Season 8, people would have assumed she was lying just to throw fans off. And here, because she said it during an April Fool's Day interview, the admission is also viewed as a falsity-driven prank. But, I ask you, would there ever be a better time for a Game of Thrones star to blurt out an actual spoiler than on the one day of the year where bombastic statements are automatically considered counterfeit?
In fact, as much as I love Maisie Williams, and as much as I'm hoping to see Arya and Jon Snow get an extremely memorable and meaningful reunion, I would now be that much more interested in watching Arya die in Episode 2, just to know she was actually telling the truth about it during this interview. That's just the kind of TV spoiler subterfuge I can get behind.
Watch the clip below and be the judge of whether Maisie Williams is cheekily being sincere or not.
Game of Thrones will kick off its lo-o-o-ong-awaited eighth season on HBO on Sunday, April 14, at 9:00 p.m. ET. (Though her role in New Mutants might never get seen.) Check out everything we know about the season so far in our comprehensive rundown.
