‘Game of Thrones’ Spoilers: Maisie Williams Needed Intense Training For Season 8 Battle

“Game of Thrones” Season 8 will include with a big battle against the Night King and his legion of followers, and it will include some fighters who have never been in any of the epic fight scenes before. Maisie Williams revealed that Arya Stark is very much involved in this battle.

“I skip the battle every year, which is bizarre since Arya’s the one who’s been training the most,” Williams told Entertainment Weekly. “This is my first taste of it. And I’ve been thrown in at the deep end.”

Director Miguel Sapochnik told Williams to start training for a full year before the episode. “Start training now because this is going to be really hard,” he’d said.

“And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’” Williams told the magazine. “But nothing can prepare you for how physically draining it is. It’s night after night, and again and again, and it just doesn’t stop. You can’t get sick, and you have to look out for yourself because there’s so much to do that nobody else can do… there are moments you’re just broken as a human and just want to cry.”

It’s clear that this final season battle sequence is huge. It took 11 weeks of night shoots to film, and it seems like every actor was on set. “Game of Thrones” cast members Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark), John Bradley (Samwell Tarley), Rory McCann (The Hound) and Liam Cunningham (Ser Davos Seaworth) are also mentioned as being in the sequence. The showrunners even compared seeing so many “Game of Thrones” characters in one place to watching a Marvel superhero movie.

However, this battle isn’t in the series finale, which will be directed by showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss. Of course, it wasn’t revealed which episode the epic battle described above will appear in, but fans won’t have to wait long. After all, “Game of Thrones” Season 8 will only be six episodes long.

“Game of Thrones” Season 8 premieres Sunday, April 14 on HBO.