Sophie Turner was 12 years old when she auditioned for Game of Thrones and 15 when it was first broadcast. She’s now 21. That’s an entire adolescence set to a backdrop of violent dynastic strife in the fantastical land of Westeros; of sex, murder, incest, betrayal, mutilations, dragons, zombies, gigantic bloody battles, children burnt at the stake to appease vengeful gods, plus a bit more sex. Well, a lot more sex. Game of Thrones is one of the muckiest things on mainstream TV. And when you’re a tweenage actress from rural Warwickshire on your first job, this can represent a learning curve. Turner recalls the first few times she met up with the other actors to go through their lines.
“The first time I found out about oral sex was reading the Game of Thrones script. I was 13. I said, ‘Wow! People do that?’
“I’d be doing a read-through and we’d be talking about very graphic stuff,” she says, drawing out the veeeeeery, eyebrows arching as high as they’ll go. “The first time I ever found out about oral sex was from reading the script. I was like … ‘Wow! People do that? That’s fascinating!’” She chuckles. “I guess that was my sex education. Being on Game of Thrones.”
We’re in a photographer’s studio in central London. Turner is wearing a bright, candy-striped blazer with matching trousers and a pair of heels that nudge her close to 6ft, and is eating a bag of Minstrels. Every so often she will pop one into her mouth and crunch on it thoughtfully, an act that can seem a little incongruous when she’s discussing, say, a notorious scene in which her character is raped, or the insecurity she experienced after being targeted by online trolls. “I still struggle with it now,” she says. “All because of someone’s shitty comment on a picture when I was 16.” She reaches for another Minstrel. Pop. Crunch.
Turner has that kind of languid well-spokenness and employs lots of looooong expressive vowels. Her sentences are punctuated with eye rolls, funny faces, proper swearing and an encouraging amount of deadpan self-deprecation. She says she “has a passion” for tequila, loves dancing to grime and gets fed up with having to live up to the squeaky-clean standards of a marketable young actress in the hunt for shampoo endorsements and Hollywood roles.
“Sometimes I think, f*** it, sure, I’ll have a cigarette tonight. I’m young. I don’t care. Sometimes I just want to rebel and fight for the freedom that my normal friends have. But other times, as much as I hate to say it, I know that I’m kind of building a brand, I guess.” She does little air quotes around “building a brand” and pulls a funny braindead expression. She is a laugh, basically.
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The joke, of course, is that her character in Game of Thrones is anything but. She plays Sansa Stark, a young noblewoman who has so far spent most of the sprawling fantasy series in various states of peril, seeing family members murdered and being passed from the clutches of one horrible man to another. But she’s one of just a handful of characters to have made it alive from the first episode all the way to the seventh and final season, which begins next month. And because Game of Thrones has slowly grown into such a staggeringly big deal – the last season was averaging more than 25 million viewers per episode – Turner’s star has risen in tandem.
She says that it’s only recently started to dawn on her quite how well known she is, and she is still getting to grips with the mechanics of it all. So not long ago, she explains, she was photographed wearing an item of clothing that she shouldn’t have been wearing.
“As an actress, it does feel in some ways that you have to whore yourself out to the audience
“I’m tied in to a brand,” she begins. “I can’t actually say what the brand is, but unknowingly, in my naivety, I did something else with this other brand, not knowing it was a competitor,” she continues, relaying this quickly, like a piece of bus-stop gossip. “When I first saw the photos I was like, ‘Yeah, but no one cares.’” Another eye roll. “But people cared! I had lawyers calling me up being like, ‘Hey, you can’t do this!’ And it kind of shook me up because I was like, ‘Oh f***, people are watching me, seeing what I’m doing, listening to what I’m saying.’” Her team have had to remind her that she is, in fact, in the public eye. “I was like, ‘Oh shit! You’re right!’”
Turner grew up in Chesterton, a little village not far from Leamington Spa. Her mum was a nursery teacher, her dad was a businessman and she attended Warwick Preparatory School and then the King’s High School for Girls, both local independents. When she began filming Game of Thrones – mostly in Belfast or Croatia – she had to be chaperoned on set by her mum, an arrangement that lasted until she was 16. It was, she says, a drag. Embarrassing. The older cast members – including hot boys Alfie Allen, Richard Madden and Kit Harrington – were out partying in the evenings and she was stuck with her mum. “It’s this presence that makes you feel like a child,” she complains, never mind the fact that she was, in fact, a child.
But she became best friends with Maisie Williams, who plays her on-screen sister, Arya, and who was stuck with her own chaperone. “Luckily, I had Maisie with me. We had each other. At the hotel, we would sneak down to the restaurant and speak to the boys. But as soon as I hit 16, my mum understood. I just needed to be on my own. And by ‘on my own’ I mean hanging out with the older kids.”
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Still a schoolgirl – she had a tutor on set – she led a funny double life. Were all her girl friends from back home pestering her to hook them up with the Game of Thrones boys? “Oh, a huuuuun-dred per cent. They were all so in love with Richard and Kit and Alfie.” So she did her best to put a word in for her mates.
“I felt like a pimp. ‘Look at these young girls I have, guys!’” she purrs, pretending to swipe through some photos on her phone. “But they were just not interested at all.”
Well … that’s a good thing, right? I mean, it speaks well of the actors involved, doesn’t it?
“Right,” she nods. “But it’s funny. Back then? Not interested. But as I get older, Kit and Richard and Alfie are like, ‘Oh, your friends are cute!’” She gives a slightly evil laugh. This is, I say, an epiphany experienced by all big brothers eventually. “Yeah, they used to see me as the little sister and we wouldn’t hang out. But now we’re best friends. Now they invite me to their parties.”
Around the age of 16, though, Turner began to notice something happening. People were starting to contact her on social media to criticise her appearance: to tell her she looked fat, or her skin was bad, or that she was ugly. And while we all probably have an abstract understanding of the phenomenon of trolling – of having anonymous strangers vent bile at you online simply because you are famous – Turner found herself on the receiving end of this in her GCSE year. While she was still just a kid. “I’m 16 and I don’t have time to work out every day because I’m working a lot, and all of a sudden I gain 5lb and people, like, rip you apart.”
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It started to really get on top of her. She was, after all, a teenage girl having strangers telling her she looked awful every time she glanced at her Instagram. So she asked for help. “I’d speak to my parents, speak to my team, and be like, ‘I really don’t want to do social media any more. I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to look at it, I don’t want to be a presence.’ But my team would kind of say to me, ‘Look … This is the modern day. Casting directors want to see how many followers you have and they’ll cast you on that basis.’ It’s written into contracts that in order to promote projects, you have to have social media. So it would be torturous, because I would have to post images. And the social media team at my agency would be like, ‘You have to post every day to keep those followers!’ It was mad. And I would do it. And then I’d obsess over it after I read the first negative comment.”
“I was the bubbliest girl in the room. But when I was trolled, I withdrew. I didn’t feel good enough
Once she knew that people were slagging her off about something, she couldn’t help picking the scab. “Are people still talking about this? Is this an issue I really have to deal with? And for every ten wonderful comments, there’d be one comment that was like, you’ve gained 10lb. And I would torture myself over it.”
I have, over the years, been on the receiving end of enough “the price of fame” whinges to know one when I hear one. But this was just a girl being made to feel rubbish while the people around her – her “team” or whatever – didn’t do much to stop it. “I only really notice it in hindsight, but prior to social media and all of that, I was an extrovert. I was always the bubbliest girl in the room. But as soon as that started, I withdrew. I would rather stay in and do nothing than go out and see my friends. Because it just affects me so much – what I look like, having to make all that effort and then not being good enough.”
In 2015, she found herself embroiled in controversy. In season five of Game of Thrones, Sansa is married off to one of the show’s principal villains, a psychopath named Ramsey Bolton. On their wedding night, he is shown raping her by candlelight, a scene that sparked an understandable amount of outrage.
“Sexual assault wasn’t something that had affected me or anybody I knew, so I was pretty blasé about the whole thing,” she says. “Naively so. And then I shot the scene, and in the aftermath there was this huge uproar that we would depict something like that on television. My first response was like, maybe we shouldn’t have put that on screen at all.”
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But then she went away and thought hard about it and concluded that, actually, she was right and her critics were wrong. “The more we talk about sexual assault the better, and screw the people who are saying we shouldn’t be putting this on TV and screw the people who are saying they’re going to boycott the show because of it. This sort of thing used to happen and it continues to happen now, and if we treat it as such a taboo and precious subject, then how are people going to have the strength to come out and feel comfortable saying that this has happened to them?”
It was, she says, a turning point. “One of the things I always struggled with growing up was just regurgitating other people’s opinions. Just saying what my mum would say, or the people around me. But this was the one thing I kind of computed on my own.”
Another thing that has helped Turner become more comfortable and more confident is the acquisition of a boyfriend. She is going out with Joe Jonas, the American pop singer and former member of the Jonas Brothers, a trio of dreamboat brothers who were huge ten years ago. Technically, Turner will not confirm that the pair are together – “I’m in a relationship, but it’s a very private relationship,” she says, smiling – but everyone knows they are. There are plenty of pap shots of the pair together, although my personal favourite sighting is of them going on a date at a bar in a Leamington Spa shopping precinct. It speaks well of her. You have a new multimillionaire boyfriend whose exes include Taylor Swift and Gigi Hadid, but you’re not so hellbent on trying to impress him that you’re embarrassed about taking him for a big night out in Leamington. They were also seen together exploring the nearby Warwick Castle. Who wouldn’t want to go on a date to Warwick Castle?
Anyway, the point is, she has a nice boyfriend, which is good. “I’m happier than I’ve been in a very long time,” she says. “I very much isolated myself for a while and forgot what was fun. Going out with friends, going out to eat, not really having a care. And people I’ve met recently in my life have drawn me out of that. It really helps you own those insecurities. The things I tortured myself about before, I can forget about.”
Still, she is acutely aware of the fact that, as an actress, the way she looks determines the amount of work she’ll get. “Appearance seems to play a very large part in getting the roles you want, regardless of whether it has any relation to how the character is supposed to be,” she says. “I see myself going up for a role against someone else and I’m like, well they’re prettier. Of course they’ll get it.”
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Actresses, she believes, are still basically there to be consumed. Regardless of how talented you may be, on some level you will always be a sex object. It’s part of the reason why, deep down, few people feel outrage when young actresses – Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst, etc – have their nude photos hacked and shared around the internet. “People are like, well, even if they don’t get naked or topless on screen, they’ve made themselves emotionally available to everyone. They’ve opened themselves up enough that it’s my right to look at it. A lot of female roles, the audience still has to fall in love with you. You have to be sexy, so that guys want to watch. It does feel in some ways that you have to whore yourself out to the audience. My brother is studying feminist epistemology, so maybe I should get him to write a dissertation on it.”
Wow. I bet he doesn’t struggle with girls.
Turner smiles sadly and sighs.
“Actually, he does.”
Before long, Game of Thrones will be over for ever. Suddenly – just like that – the defining aspect of Turner’s life for almost the past decade will be gone. She’s already featured in one of the X-Men movies as a mutant with telekinetic powers and is due to appear in more.
“It certainly does feel more like a job now. With Game of Thrones coming to an end, I’m like, ‘I need to get things lined up. I need to get this many movies a year in order to pay the bills.’ But there’s still a sense of wonder. I still can’t believe I get to go on wires and pretend to be a superhero for a day. That never gets old.”
For now, she is still so associated with Sansa that some of us struggle to understand that they are two different people. “They’ll often seem disappointed when they see me in trainers and a backpack. It’s quite jarring for them. Whenever I go out partying and drinking I’ve had people say, ‘Hmmm … That’s not very ladylike is it?’ Well, what am I supposed to do? This is me. I’m not going to be sitting at home wearing a dress and lighting candles.”
Somebody knocks on the door and says it’s time to finish the interview. Turner looks at me to check that this is OK and that I got everything I needed. “Are you a happy bunny?” she asks sweetly. Yes, I say. I am a happy bunny. Are you a happy bunny? She thinks about this for a moment. “I think I’m a happy bunny,” she says slowly, with a frown. And then she’s up and off. She takes the empty bag of Minstrels with her.
Game of Thrones returns on Sky Atlantic on July 17
Shoot credits
Styling Prue White Hair Earl Simms at Caren Agency. Make-up Florrie White at Bryant Arts using Bobbi Brown Dogs Thanks to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home. To find out more about rehoming a Battersea dog visit battersea.org.uk
Image 1 Dress, £700, Versus Versace (versace.com); boots, £720 (fendi.com); earrings, £18,400, and ring, £23,900 (messika.com)
Image 2 Sweater, £625, Mugler (selfridges.com); shorts, £625, Alexander McQueen (harrods.com); shoes, £1,070 (gianvitorossi.com); earrings, £395 (louisvuitton.com); rings, £6,950 each (vancleefarpels.com)