Perched on a tiny wooded island that’s humming with African rainforest birds, Gorilla Kingdom is easily one of the main attractions at London Zoo. On this unseasonably mild Tuesday morning in late February, it’s a hive of activity for good reason: the troop of western lowland primates who live here have two adorable newborns in its midst. “Look, there she is, with her little one!” says Sophie Turner pointing towards Effie, the proud mama who’s swinging from monkey bars with her yet-to-be-named two-week-old.
The actor had initially proposed a walk on Primrose Hill, but happily obliged when I suggested a detour to the nearby zoo – because who could possibly resist the allure of baby gorillas? As a mother of two young children, Turner, 28, is familiar with the terrain. When she lived in New York, she would often take her daughters, Willa, who is almost four, and Delphine, who turns two in July, to Central Park Zoo. This morning she’s come from drop-off at Willa’s new nursery school in west London and arrives wrapped up in an oversized camel-coloured Maison Margiela coat that has cool mum written all over it. “It’s actually the one coat I brought with me from America,” says Turner, who moved from Miami back to the UK last year. “If you can believe it, I only packed one suitcase.”
Fresh-faced and twinkly eyed, her long blonde hair tucked casually into her collar, Turner could easily be mistaken for a very stylish Swedish au pair on her gap year. “‘Effie is our most playful and cheeky female, she was born in 1993 at Copenhagen Zoo, and is well-known in the Zoo for her huge appetite,’” she says, reading the gorilla’s bio aloud, the thespian notes of her voice dialled up for dramatic effect. This attracts the attention of a nerdy but charming zookeeper, who proceeds to share the particulars of Effie’s birthing story in minute detail: as it turns out, this baby, Effie’s fourth, was born wrapped in its umbilical cord and is lucky to be feeding normally. “Do you see how she’s dangling her baby by one arm? That’s actually not the best way to handle their newborns,” says the zookeeper, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “They’re supposed to be wrapped around the body.” As he speaks, a crowd has begun to gather and Effie and her idiosyncratic parenting skills are beginning to cause some disdain. “So you mean to say she’s a mother of four and she still hasn’t learnt how to carry her baby correctly?” asks a voice in a mock accusatory tone. The actor turns to me, eyebrows raised. She’s clearly thinking what I’m thinking: how depressing that mum-shaming is a thing, even for animals!
Turner is no stranger to her own brand of casual misogyny. In the last six months, she’s been subject to mum-shaming of the most egregious kind. Following news last September that her husband, Joe Jonas, had filed for divorce after four years of marriage, and the release of a joint statement on Instagram in which the couple announced they had “mutually decided to amicably end our marriage”, the narrative surrounding their break-up took a predictably toxic turn. Rumours that she’d been somehow shirking her maternal responsibilities proliferated in the tabloids and on gossip websites. It wasn’t too hard to read between the lines: “She likes to party, he likes to stay at home. They have different lifestyles,” a source told TMZ. The insidious bad-mother trope, old as time, spread wide when images of Turner at a wrap party in Birmingham for Joan – the six-part ITV drama inspired by the true story of Joan Hannington, Britain’s most notorious jewel thief – began to circulate. “Sophie Turner Partied ‘Without a Care in the World,’” read one retrograde headline. Meanwhile, her pop idol husband was portrayed as the doting dad, captured dutifully tending to his two daughters by the paparazzi.
“I mean, those were the worst few days of my life,” says Turner, drawing a sharp intake of breath, the memory clearly still fresh enough to strike like a gut punch. We’ve moved from the frenzy of the Gorilla Kingdom to a quiet corner in the zoo’s canteen, a vast light-filled space that’s crammed with long white tables and, mercifully, virtually empty now that the breakfast rush is over. “I remember I was on set, I was contracted to be on set for another two weeks, so I couldn’t leave. My kids were in the States and I couldn’t get to them because I had to finish Joan. And all these articles started coming out…” she says, pausing to sip on a strawberry smoothie. “It hurt because I really do completely torture myself over every move I make as a mother – mum guilt is so real! I just kept having to say to myself, ‘None of this is true. You are a good mum and you’ve never been a partier.’”
At first, to the outside world at least, the couple had shared a united front, posting their joint statement the day after Jonas had filed legal papers in Miami. There are elements about the breakdown of her marriage she cannot discuss for legal reasons, such as whether news of the divorce was unexpected or that, as Jonas’s side has suggested, she was “aware” he was going to file. Much like everyone else, she has claimed she got wind of it all via the media. Then the “wayward mother” stories began. “I mean, it’s unfathomable the amount of people that will just make shit up and put it up based on a picture. A picture might tell a thousand words, but it’s not my story. It felt like I was watching a movie of my life that I hadn’t written, hadn’t produced, or starred in. It was shocking. I’m still in shock.”
Turner, who plays the lead in Joan, credits the crew and cast of the show for carrying her through the tumult. “They were my emotional support people, my family,” she says. “I really don’t know what I would have done without them.” Ruth Kenley-Letts, the show’s executive producer, saw the fallout first-hand, describing Turner to me over the phone as “an elegant powerhouse of a human being”.
“It was absolutely shocking what happened to her. The paparazzi were relentless. I remember we were shooting in Spain, on the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere, and they managed to get a photo of Sophie,” she says with an exasperated sigh. “I just couldn’t believe the lies that I read, that she was somehow out partying. And I knew they were lies, because I was with her. I’d been with her for five months straight.”
It was in this emotionally heightened state that Turner would film the most challenging scenes in the series. “I think I’m always drawn to the characters that have gone through so much in their lives that come out of it so strong, resilient,” says Turner, who received an Emmy nomination for her portrayal of Sansa Stark, the steely queen in the North in the wildly popular fantasy drama Game of Thrones. When we first meet her character in Joan, she’s a 19-year-old who’s just escaped an abusive marriage to a violent criminal and is grappling with the decision to put her two-year-old daughter, Kelly, into voluntary care. Later, she is devastated again by the loss of her second husband and partner in crime, Boise Hannington.
“I’m not very good at processing my emotions. I lock them away and then they’ll bubble up in years to come in some form of depression or anxiety,” she explains. Playing Joan gave her nowhere to hide. “With this role I was actually able to process those feelings.” Meanwhile, a backlash to the misogynist narrative surrounding her personal life was brewing. Her experience, a shameless affront to working mothers everywhere, had struck a nerve in the culture, one that had thousands of fans rushing to her defence online. “If something like this had happened to me 10 years ago I don’t think I would have had the same support. I just feel very lucky to be alive in a time when people are open-minded,” she says. “Thank fuck for Gen Z.”
Things reached fever pitch when it was reported that she was suing her estranged husband for the return of their daughters to England who, Turner claimed, was refusing to turn over the children’s passports. (Jonas’s team were quick to respond, releasing a statement that underlined his desire to coparent and adding, “This is an unfortunate legal disagreement about a marriage that is sadly ending.” In January, the lawsuit was dismissed, as the pair had reached a custody agreement.)
“There were some days that I didn’t know if I was going to make it. I would call my lawyer saying, ‘I can’t do this. I just can’t.’ I was just never strong enough to stand up for myself. And then, finally, after two weeks of me being in a rut, she reminded me that it was my children I was fighting for,” she says. “Once anyone says to me, ‘Do it for your kids,’ I’m doing it. I wouldn’t do it for myself, but I’ll find the strength for them.”
At the age of 24, Turner was among the first of her peers to become a mother. She recalls finding out she was pregnant while on a retreat in Bali. “It was my first day there and I was meeting my roommate for the first time. Before we settled down to chat, I told her that I just needed to go and take a pregnancy test. I took the test and was like: ‘I’m pregnant, so nice to meet you!’”
“Maybe because I was so young, I sat on it for a week,” she recalls. “Thankfully there were therapists there to help me talk things through. I told my husband when I got back. I remember throwing the pregnancy test at him, saying ‘What do you think we should do? Do you think we should have it?’ When you’re in your early 20s, life is so frivolous. At that point, I really didn’t know if I wanted to be a mother, but something changed in me that day. I just knew I had to have her.”
Her eldest child, Willa, arrived in the summer of 2020 when much of the world was locked down. It afforded Turner a 10-month period of uninterrupted mother-daughter bonding time. “At that age, everything changes so quickly. One week they’re breastfeeding and the next they’re sitting there eating avocado. It’s a real miracle to just watch them grow up in front of your eyes,” she says. Delphine, who was born two years later, was very much planned. “Because my ex and I travel so much, I wanted Willa to have a sibling. I wanted them to have each other,” she explains. “They’re so much fun, total girlie girls and absolute rays of sunshine in my life.”
For Turner, who has spoken about her struggles with an eating disorder in the past, motherhood would prove transformative in ways she could have never imagined. “To be honest, having kids was the best thing for my relationship to my body. I remember after I had my baby, my therapist asked me how I felt in my body. And of course I was like, ‘Well, there’s milk leaking from my breasts and I’ve been bleeding for a month.’ Then she reminded me how amazing it is that our bodies can do this and how important it is to put all the nutrients in your body so that it can do that. I mean, it sounds so simple, but I never thought of my body in that way before,” she says. “Being a young girl, especially one growing up in the spotlight, you really judge yourself.”
As a teenager, the actor was often the target of online trolls who would make snide comments if her weight fluctuated even slightly. But the bullying didn’t stop there. “When you’re bulimic, your face tends to bloat. So when I finally did get better in my early 20s, my face went back to normal. Then, suddenly, all the comments were about whether I’d had buccal fat removal or not. So yeah, you can never win.”
These days, Turner takes frequent breaks from social media and has been able to better manage her eating disorder as a result. Still, negative thoughts are tougher to tune out in moments of extreme stress. One can only imagine the toll the last six months have taken. When I ask how she’s coping, however, Turner appears sanguine. “I know when I’m in a bad headspace that the eating thing will always flare up,” she explains. “But now I regulate it by sitting in the discomfort and just getting used to that feeling of being full. It’s all exposure therapy. I think life is exposure therapy.”
Turner is an ardent advocate of therapy and has taken medication to help with her anxiety and depression in the past, though she is currently not taking any. “Not since I moved back to the UK,” she says. “Which is great and also surprising, because I anticipated that I’d need to – now perhaps more than ever.” I’m curious to know what might have made the difference. “There’s something about a community and a support system that I’ve never realised is so important up until now. And I think the reason I was on medication for so long is because I didn’t have those people with me. Now that I’m back home, I’m actually the happiest I’ve been in a really long time. I’m starting over again, rediscovering what I like to do, who I like to be with.”
The youngest of three, Turner grew up in a close-knit community in Chesterton, a small village in Warwickshire. She looks back on her childhood with fondness – her first memories involve running around her grandparents’s garden in her nappies. At the age of three, her mother, Sally, a schoolteacher back then, enrolled her into acting classes in hopes it would bring her painfully shy toddler out of her shell. “And then I just become such a show-off,” says Turner, chuckling. “Typical performing arts kid, always putting on plays for her parents.” She can trace the acting gene back to her grandfather, who was an extra in film and TV and was in an amateur dramatic society up until he died, when Turner was a teenager. “He was my kindred spirit, my spirit animal,” says Turner.
Emily Quash, the artistic director at Playbox, a youth theatre in Warwick, says the actor always stood out. “Sophie was a very physical performer, an amazing dancer and aerialist, as well as being a super actress,” says Quash, who’s known Turner since she
joined the theatre as a child. “She appeared to be completely unaware of how artistically capable she was.”
When Turner was cast in Game of Thrones at the age of 13, the change to her life was, she says, hardly dramatic: she’d work from June to November, then be in school for the rest of the year. “None of my school friends were old enough to watch Game of Thrones, so it was all so normal,” she explains. “Plus my [older] brothers kept me humble. My brother, Will, was on the rugby team at school and would basically intimidate any guy who would try and get close, so I never really got a date,” she says. “It worked to my advantage, but also not at the same time.”
When Turner finally did go on her now famous first date, aged 20, to a pub in Camden, her brother was at her side. “Joe had just DM-ed me on Instagram. I brought my brother and all my guy friends because I didn’t know if I was maybe getting catfished,” she says. What followed was a whirlwind romance: Jonas, six years older, proposed in 2017, a year after they met. They eloped to Las Vegas in 2019 after attending the Billboard Music Awards just hours prior. A second ceremony was held in Provence that summer for friends and family. By the time she was married and living in Los Angeles, it was as if her feet had barely touched the ground. “It was really surreal, like a fever dream,” says Turner. “Because he was older than me, I just felt like I was really taken care of, to the point I came back home and didn’t know how to do anything for myself.”
She found her new life in LA to be quite isolating. “You can’t just bump into someone at a bar there, you have to drive 40 minutes with an intention of seeing someone.” Although she was fully welcomed into her husband’s big celebrity family, a sense of unease lingered. “There was a lot of attention on the three brothers, and the wives. Well, we were always called the wives, and I hated that,” she says. “It was kind of this plus-one feeling. And that’s nothing to do with him – in no way did he make me feel that – it was just that the perception of us was as the groupies in the band.”
Those feelings of alienation were only exacerbated when she and Jonas moved their young family to Miami in 2021. For the actor, it was nothing short of culture shock. “We were in this community full of 50-year-old men, so imagine trying to make friends on the dog walk,” she says. “I just felt like a little bird trapped in a gilded cage. It was amazing, yes, but I didn’t have any friends there.” As a parent, she was also increasingly unsettled by America’s gun violence epidemic. When news of the Uvalde killings broke in the spring of 2022, she was overwhelmed. “I couldn’t fathom being a mother of one of those children knowing that this was something your country could fix, that they’d rather have rights to guns than give kids a right to life,” she says. “Meanwhile, women in the US are being stripped of their rights, left, right and centre. It all contributed to this feeling of I have to get out, I have to get out.”
The moment she moved back to the UK, she quickly fell into the embrace of family and close friends, most of whom she’s known since primary school. “I’ve always said that my girlfriends are the loves of my life,” she says. One of her oldest and dearest friends, Eleanor Johnson, tells me: “We always sort of joke that we’re sisters.” “Ellie stayed with me when I was out in New York, slept over in my bed every night for weeks and weeks and weeks,” says Turner. “The support I had from the women in my life during that time was the most amazing thing to see. I felt so held and so protected.” Johnson, for her part, was floored by her friend’s emotional fortitude. “I don’t think Sophie even realises the inner strength or power she has,” she says.
Around the same time, Turner was forging a new friendship. Taylor Swift, who besides being one the world’s biggest pop stars had also briefly dated Joe Jonas when she was 18, was spotted having dinner with Turner at glittery Manhattan restaurant Via Carota. As the story goes, Swift’s relationship with Jonas had famously ended with a 27-second phone call, which is said to have inspired the singer to write “Forever & Always” for Fearless, her second album. “Taylor was an absolute hero to me this year,” says Turner, who first met Swift around a decade prior but, for obvious reasons, hadn’t felt she was able to cultivate the friendship. When she found herself in New York last September without a place to stay, she reached out to Swift in hopes the pop star might know someone renting. Swift immediately offered up her place for free. “I’ve never been more grateful to anyone than I am for her because she took my children and me, and provided us with a home and a safe space,” she says. “She really has a heart of gold.”
The next time I meet Turner, a couple of weeks later, it’s for tea at Café Antonia in Le Bristol hotel in Paris. Surrounded by frescoed walls and crystal chandeliers, we’re a long way from the picnic tables at the zoo. Turner has a long-standing relationship with Louis Vuitton and has been one of artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière’s muses for more than six years. It’s easy to forget that she’s already been making red-carpet appearances for over half of her young life. “The first time I walked the red carpet I remember I had to buy my own clothes. I didn’t have a stylist,” she says of her 13-year-old self. “I wore a Topshop dress and a pair of red Vivienne Westwood shoes, which were the biggest purchase I’d ever made because I’d just gotten paid.”
In a vintage red Ralph Lauren V-neck sweater, simple black leggings and black ankle boots, her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, Turner looks chic without trying too hard. In a couple of hours, she’ll begin the glamorous process of getting red-carpet ready. Up until recently, she’d been used to attending such events with her former partner on her arm; tonight she’ll arrive at the show by herself. That said, she’s not entirely alone in Paris. In the past few days, she’s been papped on more than one occasion floating around the French capital with her rumoured new beau, Peregrine Pearson, a handsome British property developer and viscount’s son. “I am having fun dating. It’s very fun,” admits Turner, her striking blue eyes sparkling. “I mean, it’s strange when you get married so young. It’s like you never really learn how to date. So it’s all very new to me.”
Still, she’s got a good sense of what she now needs to form healthy relationships, romantic or otherwise. “The number one most important thing in a relationship is communication,” she says. “I’ve started doing this thing with friends called Safe Space Saturdays. We can tell each other anything that’s on our minds and sort it out with really healthy communication, because I never want to be left in the dark in a relationship.” More than anything, she’s hoping to build a functioning coparenting relationship with Jonas. “I’m unhappy with the way everything played out, especially when it comes to my children. They’re the victims in all of this. But I think we’re doing the best we can,” she says. “I’m confident that we can figure it out. Joe is a great father to our children and that’s all that I can ask for.”
I wonder whether she can envision one big happy blended family some day, something like Jennifer Garner, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. She knits her brow momentarily to ponder the thought. “My dream is to have a huge Christmas where my daughters can have their dad there, Joe’s whole side of the family, their grandparents,” she says. “I don’t care about the politics, I just want the girls to feel loved and have everyone show up for them.”
We arrange to meet later that evening in front of the famous pyramid at the Louvre, the venue for Vuitton’s show. I arrive a little ahead of Turner and, despite the rain and the romance of the city, the scene is quite literally a zoo: there are several camps of screaming fans, each waving hand-drawn signs under their umbrellas for various K-pop stars and Hollywood A-listers. Turner turns up looking every inch the latter – skin glowing, hair coiffed into loose waves – and strides past the blitz of flashing cameras in a pair of striped high-waisted trousers and a bustier with draped hot pink sleeves from the brand’s new spring collection. Despite the hubbub, Turner is decidedly calm and in an exceptionally good mood as we cross the sprawling courtyard. She talks excitedly about the things she’s looking forward to this year, including a thriller she’s about to start shooting in a couple of months called Trust. The film centres on the life of a fictional movie star whose private photos are leaked online. Pregnant and afraid, she does her best to escape the media frenzy but ends up trapped in a panic room of sorts. Ultimately, it’s her child who gives her the will to find a way forward. “When the script came along, I couldn’t believe it had come to me at this time. There’s no way I can’t not do it. It feels right. Although maybe next time I should pick a romcom and manifest that instead,” she says, with a wry smile.
The lights are about to go up on the runway as we approach the VIP entrance to the show, tucked away in one of the museum’s many darkened archways. Soon she will take her seat on the front row with the likes of Saoirse Ronan and Cate Blanchett. “You know, I’m so used to being with Joe at these things, so you’ll just have to be my Vuitton wife this time,” she jokes, squeezing my arm. The truth is Turner doesn’t need me, or anyone else, to prop her up. She’s doing just fine, all by herself.
Joan will air on ITV1 and ITVX this Autumn.
Cover look: Viscose/cotton tuxedo jacket and trousers, Wales Bonner. Hair: Jimmy Paul. Make-up: Hannah Murray. Nails: Adam Slee. Set design: Gideon Ponte. Production: Holmes Production. Digital artwork: Magnus Bergqvist. With thanks to Castle Gibson