Maisie Williams' New Animated Series Sounds Perfect For 'Game Of Thrones' Fans

Game of Thrones is heading into its final season, but the cast already has big plans for the future. On Saturday, Sept. 15, it was revealed that Maisie Williams joined the cast of a new animated series called gen:LOCK. The series takes place during a worldwide war, and will follow a team of young pilots who have been trained to control the giant robot bodies called "mecha," according to Entertainment Weekly. The series will be from Rooster Teeth, an Austin-based production company. It's the second animated show the group will release, and it will premiere on their streaming platform. The casting announcement dropped at the RTX Festival, a U.K. edition of Rooster Teeth Festival, along with a third new teaser for the show.

Williams' character already has a name and story. According to EW, the actor will voice Cammie MacCloud, a Scottish hacker and the youngest member of the gen:LOCK team. The character will reportedly be mischievous and energetic, which sounds perfect for the star. In a statement to Variety, showrunner Gray G. Haddock talked about how excited he was for the casting. "Working with Maisie is as fun as it gets," Haddock reportedly said. "Her energy and the sense of humor she brings to Cammie is an absolute delight. I'm running out of superlatives to describe how perfect this cast works for the characters, but Maisie truly sounds exactly like how Cammie does in my head — she's brilliant."

The cast for the series already includes Michael B. Jordan, who will voice the lead character Julian Chase, according to Variety. David Tennant will be Dr. Rufus Weller, who is a scientist for the Experimental Science Unit and the inventor of the gen:LOCK technology. The series will also include Dakota Fanning voicing Miranda Worth, a mech pilot, and Kōichi Yamadera as one of the new recruits, her character having just transferred from Japan's military forces to fight alongside the others.

The series is the the second anime to come from Rooster Teeth. Their other anime title RWBY was the first western animated series to be distributed in Japan, according to Deadline. According to Variety, gen:LOCK will be co-produced with Michael B. Jordan's Outlier productions. It will be available to watch exclusively through the company's streaming platform.

Gen:LOCK will premiere in January of 2019, kicking off a busy year for Williams. During the Television Critics Association summer press tour in 2018, HBO confirmed fans could expect the final season of Game of Thrones to air during the first half of 2019. Williams joined the show as Arya Stark in 2011, and has been a key member of the cast since the beginning of the popular series.

The ending of the show is sure to be emotional for the cast. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, William's co-star and real-life BFF Sophie Turner discussed production on the final season of the show. "The first day of the actors coming in and that kind of production starting, the day where we had the final read-through for the final script, it was really bittersweet," she told THR. "It was hard. At the end of the very last script, they read aloud, 'End of Game of Thrones.' As soon as they read that out, pretty much everyone burst into tears. There was a standing ovation for showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss. We were all clapping and cheering. It was amazing."

It might be difficult to leave the show behind after so many years, but Williams is clearly prepared for the future. The animated show is a departure from her live-action roles, but the science-fiction series sounds like the best way to kick off the next phase of her career.