‘Game of Thrones’ star Maisie Williams wants to fight nepotism with new app

Daisie
App

• Maisie Williams, who plays Arya Stark on “Game of
  Thrones,” just launched an app (called “Daisie”) that aims to
  find creative talent across multiple industries. 
• Daisie, which launched Wednesday, is meant to be a
  “safe place” for creative people to upload their projects and
  potentially meet other people to collaborate with.
• Business Insider sat down with Williams and the app’s
  cofounder, Dom Santry, in New York City to discuss their hopes
  for the app and its goals to shake up creative industries by
  helping artists with little resources to get their foot in the
  door.

In the entertainment industry,
it’s nearly impossible to get your foot in the door if you don’t
know someone on the other side of it.

Maisie Williams’ life changed for
good when she was 12 years old. She had recently gotten an agent
who was also new to the business. Her agent, a drama teacher who
saw that a lot of her students struggled with getting
representation, decided to become one herself, so she could make
things happen for them.

“
I was maybe one of 20 kids she had,” Williams
told Business Insider. “And my second audition was for ‘Game of
Thrones.’
”

Williams knew it was a major role
on an HBO drama, and a big deal, but didn’t realize how
life-changing it would be considering she didn’t even know if the
pilot would get picked up to series. And she didn’t know how huge
the series would become, that it would run for eight seasons, or
that she’d get an Emmy nomination when she was 19.

Now, with “Thrones” behind her,
Williams wants to give talented artists (musicians, writers,
filmmakers, and more) the opportunity she got.

Williams, who wrapped shooting
season 8 of “Game of Thrones” two weeks before meeting with
Business Insider in Manhattan’s East Village in late July, calls
herself “lucky” a lot — probably a dozen
times in the hour we spent together. She was fresh off a red-eye
from San Francisco, where she met with investors in Silicon
Valley.

At just 21 years old, Williams is
hyper-aware of the advantages that got her where she is today.
With almost a decade of experience in the film and television
industry, Williams has learned that her story is quite unique:
most people have to know someone to get a role on any
level, from acting to crew. And Williams said she hopes to fight
nepotism with Daisie, an
app she cofounded that
launched Wednesday.

In 2016, Williams worked on a
Netflix original film called “iBoy.” On set, she met Dom Santry,
a camera loader. Dom had been working in production for some
time, and he got the opportunity because of his brother’s
godfather, a producer.

“I just happened to have this one
guy I could rely on to help get me my first job,” Santry said.
“And then on my first job, I annoyed enough people that they took
me to the next job, and then on the next job I did the
same.”

But Santry thought his struggling
creative friends were even more talented than he was, which is
where the frustration started to build.
 Williams felt the same way. Both knew
plenty of talented artists who were hustling with day jobs or
waiting tables. And they knew some who had just completely given
up on their creative endeavors because nothing worked out for
them after years of trying.

Together, they founded Daisy Chain
Productions, a film production company whose first film,
“Stealing Silver” (which stars Williams), premieres at the
Savannah Film Festival in October. After long nights of talking
solutions to the biggest problem in the entertainment industry
over beers in Williams’ London flat, Santry came up with the idea
for Daisie (a hybrid of their names).

On
Daisie, users can showcase their work in progress and get
feedback from other users.
Daisie

Originally conceived as a
website, Santry would use his business savvy and connections to
develop a place where creative people could post their work,
including their process. It would be a place with no visible
follower count where users could safely meet, collaborate, and
give each other meaningful feedback.

To make this place influential,
Williams — with her years of experience,
connections, and celebrity — would help
spread the word, so talented users got where they needed to be,
and met the people they needed to meet in order to advance their
careers. Williams’ connections (she is, after all, the reason why

Ed Sheeran had a cameo in season 7 of “Game of Thrones”),
started to prove useful months before launch. In March, she and
Santry met with agents and clients at William Morris Endeavor
(WME) in Los Angeles, one of the most prominent talent
agencies. 

In addition to recruiting talent,
Santry gathered a team to build the app (there’s six people
working at Daisie now, and they’re all under 25), while Williams
helped as much as she could on the side, mostly through FaceTime
at odd hours from the “Thrones” set. In May, two months before
Daisie’s launch, it put out a video
with a little help from Williams’ friends including Sophie Turner
(Sansa Stark on “Thrones”), called the Daisie 100. In the video,
Daisie invited people to submit their work so it could find 100
artists to embody what the app was all about before its
launch.

“
We wanted to find 100 people who didn’t have
any representation, who had no foothold in any industry, but were
extremely talented,” Williams said. “And we wanted to bring
diversity onto the app to set the tone for the standard of the
work.”

Santry added that they made a
decision to find diversity in gender, race, and the type of work:
they didn’t want everyone to be a singer/songwriter, or everyone
to be an oil painter. “
We
threw an event in London and we met them all,” he said. “We put
them all in this room and they said how inspired they were to
give another go. So many of them have had so many setbacks and so
many people being like, ‘You’re not good enough.  That’s why
you haven’t made it.’”

Finding female
filmmakers — still an absurd rarity in the
entertainment industry — was also important to
Williams.

“I always think about the female
directors that I’ve worked with,” she said. “Because I’ve worked
with three or four female directors in my career and some people
never even get work with one. For women, for anyone who
feels underrepresented within their creative communities, I hope
that this is a place where they can really prosper.”

Williams also views Daisie as a
source for finding talent to work on future Daisy Chain
Productions projects. “We have all these incredibly talented
people, and we can potentially make their films with a budget
and with production value.” In the coming months, Williams and
Santry hope to find well-connected, influential artists such as
Williams herself to represent Daisie across the industries
they’re less familiar with, like music, animation, and
literature. And once they figure out how users interact with the
app (and how often) over the next few months, they’ll brainstorm
monetization plans. Right now, there is no
paywall.  

“There was this question we would
always get early on,” Williams said. “Like, ‘So what about if
someone got a career from Daisie? Do you own them? Do you get to
control them? Are you the agent that gets to own them, kind of
like how Simon Cowell owns everyone?’ A
nd we’re like, ‘No. We’re all about people
starting their own careers. At the moment, we want to build
something which helps that. And everything else will come later.
It will fall into place,
”
she said.

As it grows, Daisie hopes to provide even more
industries for creators.
Daisie
App

Williams and Santry said their
dream scenario for a Daisie success story is that someone “higher
up” in the industry sees work on the app, like a short film, and
actually does try to turn it into something big. “People
are getting sold from YouTube all the time,” Williams said. “But
what if there was one place where that creativity could live? It
could be the home for creative and talented people to work with
each other, inspire each other, and ultimately push forward with
their career. That’s Daisie.”

A lot of people have asked
Williams and Santry what separates Daisie from a visual app like
Instagram, where many artists show their work already. But they
don’t view it as the same thing, especially as true believers in
collaboration.

“W
e want this to facilitate the existing
platforms,” Santry said. “It’s definitely not ‘Daisie or
Instagram?’ It’s Daisie and. This is the building block.
You will always have a better final product than working solo.
Then that can live on Instagram, or wherever, regardless.”

While portfolio platforms for
artists online like DeviantArt and Behance push their users to share
their work and communicate, Diasie is less about showing and more
about doing. Both DeviantArt (which skews toward fandom art) and
Behance (which skews toward graphic design) have likes, and
encourage users to show their finished product. But they also
emphasize what’s popular on the site, which can leave some
talented artists in the dark. On Daisie, popularity isn’t
considered. Williams and Santry want users to show their process.
In doing so, they hope users ultimately can find someone on the
app who thinks the same way — or helps them
think better — so they can make great work
together. “We want you to find your people,” the app’s “about”
page says.

For now,
Daisie — which Williams calls “the social
media for misfits”— is Williams’ primary focus
and passion.

“In terms of acting, there are
some wonderful roles coming up that I’m looking forward to, she
said, including a play (her stage debut) in Lauren Gunderson’s “I
and You” in London this fall. “But I’m really looking forward to
having a bit of a more normal life, and almost having a 9 to 5
working on Daisie … feeling a little bit like I have a routine,
because it’s something that I’ve really missed for a long time.
It’s actually quite healthy.”