Maisie Williams preparation to play Catherine Dior sounds awful
Did you know that Christian Dior had a baby sister who was a part of an underground group of the French Resistance during World War II? I didn’t! Her name was Catherine, she was the muse for her brother’s iconic Miss Dior perfume, and her full story was recounted in Justine Picardie’s novel Miss Dior: A Wartime Story of Courage and Couture, which has just been adapted into a 10-part series on Apple TV+. Renamed The New Look, Maisie Williams plays Miss Catherine Dior with Ben Mendelsohn as Christian Dior, Juliette Binoche as Coco Chanel, and Glenn Close and John Malkovich rounding out the cast. Harper’s Bazaar UK got author Justine Picardie to interview Maisie — the two never met during filming in 2022 — about the punishing, very unglamorous task of depicting Catherine’s story on screen:
Again, the art of casting: At 26, Williams is the same age as Catherine Dior when she was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in July 1944. Catherine had joined the Resistance three years earlier, and risked her life on a daily basis as a key member of a covert network called F2, which gathered intelligence for the Allies. Williams chooses her words with care when she speaks, in a way that I imagine Catherine would have done; and like Catherine, she is thoughtful, giving the impression of being wise for her years. (Nina Gold, the casting director for Game of Thrones, described Williams as an “old soul” at the age of 12, when filming began on the series.)
On filming concentration camp scenes: “It was very relentless,” she says; “the process of doing take after take, it really breaks down your character in a way. It’s not for everyone, but for me, I like to get lost in a role, and keep on pushing until we complete a scene.”
This sounds very Joan of Arc: Even when Williams is almost wordless on screen — and Catherine’s silence was integral to her courage, given that she refused to give the names of her comrades in the Resistance to the Gestapo, thereby saving their lives — her presence is powerful, and propels the narrative onwards. And the physicality of Williams’ performance is startling: her head was shaved, to mirror Catherine’s brutalising arrival at Ravensbrück, where the women underwent a dehumanising process that turned them into nameless numbers in the Nazi death camps. Williams also lost 12 kilograms [26.5 pounds], in order to realistically portray Catherine’s emaciated appearance when she returned to Paris at the end of the war, close to death, ravaged by pain and haunted by the suffering of the camps.
Her weight loss regimen was insane: This regime was carefully overseen by medical professionals, with regular blood tests and measurements of her heart rate; yet it sounds gruelling. “I was eating very little, meditating all the time, burning candles and incense in my apartment.” Much of the weight loss, she says, came from sweating out fluid just before filming — in the same way the boxers and jockeys reach their target weights for the day of a fight or race. “I had to be up at 4am to start sweating. The night before, at about 7 or 8pm I was allowed to have something salty and dehydrating — some smoked salmon and a tiny glass of wine. Then I had a boiling-hot bath with lots of salts in it. And I sort of levitated to bed and slept for maybe three hours, and woke up and had a handful of nuts. I wouldn’t be able to sleep through the night at this point. I kept waking up and feeling like a marble inside a bottle, rattling around…”
What got her through the intensity: “There was a lot of feeling restricted, almost like sleep paralysis, dreams of being trapped and attacked, and horrible visions of men in uniform.” At the same time, she adds, she understood the importance of maintaining her belief in the more positive aspects of the story. After all, Catherine Dior made a new life for herself as a rose-grower in Provence, drawing solace from the natural world, while her brother created a legacy of enduring beauty. “Every day of filming was a reminder that we were portraying a story of the horrors that humans are capable of inflicting on one another, but also the magic and the hope and the love… Ultimately, we wanted to make a show that was uplifting.”
There’s a lot more covered in the full article, which was a very compelling read. In these excerpts on her acting preparation, I feel like Maisie gives pragmatic answers without dwelling on the torture of it all, as some actors are wont to do (I leave you to fill in those blanks). Maybe it’s a British quality, but she seems just to list the facts of what she did — and quite eloquently, that line about being “a marble inside a bottle, rattling around,” lingered with me — yet without adding too much commentary on the cost of it. That being said, this was a severe physical transformation. 26.5 pounds may not sound like much, but Maisie is tiny! She can’t do something like this for every project, not to mention the weight loss components will get harder with age (I speak from experience). But what a fantastic role to land and redefine herself with post Game of Thrones. I’ll be tuning in. And not for nothing, I’m very curious to see how the dynamic is depicted between the siblings.
Photos credit: Roger Wong/INSTARimages, IMAGO/RW / Avalon and via Instagram/Harper’s Bazaar UK
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