‘It’s so embarrassing’: Sophie Turner on anger, romance and the horror of watching Game of Thrones | television

SOvie Turner has a silly comedic vibe in real life – a smart pantsuit, an arched but friendly expression, perfect hair, and she looks ready for some funny people and a sunset drink. She seems very comfortable in her own skin, which is unusual anyway when you’re not 30, but especially inappropriate given her varied on-screen personas: first, in Game of Thrones. Cast as 13-year-old Sansa Stark, who was 14 when she started filming, she embodied an anxious aristocratic self-possession at an age when the average person couldn’t even keep track of their socks. After six seasons, arguably at the height of GoT’s influence, she’s Jean Gray in X-Men: Apocalypse, a role she reprized in 2019’s action-packed, super-powered Dark Phoenix.

She’s now the lead in Steal, a Prime Video drama about a corporate heist, though that makes it seem desk-and-keyboard-based, when in fact it’s tense and alarmingly fast-paced. The bad guys move in a malicious swarm like hornets. Unlucky middle managers are killed almost instantly; It’s impossible to say for the longest time whether we look to gangsters or hacking geniuses, motivated by greed or chaos. It’s a debut screenplay by novelist Sotiris Nikias (who writes crime under the pseudonym, Ray Celestine), and it feels original, not so much in the action and ultraviolence as in the trade-offs it refuses to make: Whatever explosions happen, whatever the chase around a seedy pension fund’s investment office, you still can’t call it an action drama. It has a narrative feel, like characters from David Nicholls’ book waking up in Die Hard, and there’s a constant downward spiral, as you try to figure out who’s being assaulted and who’s being abused.

The focal point is Turner’s performance as Zara, the office drone action heroine – by turns petrified, searching, weary, bewildered. “There’s a lot of betrayal, and the stakes are so high, you can’t prepare for the feeling,” she says, explaining that no matter how much research she does into the future, her decisions are always made in the moment. “I don’t even remember what happens in the script! You think you have an understanding of who they are, the power dynamics and who they are as a person, and then the next episode, you’ve got it wrong, and it’s a whole other game. It’s a constant puzzle-solving game.”

She says her character is much more than a damsel in distress, with traces of nihilism and “a lot of anger and sadness.” “A lot of the reasons Zara does what she does is because she grew up with an alcoholic and abusive mother.” The director had a game of cat and mouse with the cast – the villains have elaborate but very precise prosthetics, so all their faces look a bit off but it’s not clear why, as if they were rendered by an amateur sculptor. Turner says the rest of the cast saw the disguise for the first time when they started filming, and they were just as confused as the viewers. The mood is deliberately menacing and chaotic. “Capturing one was a surprise to all of us,” Turner says. “They wanted to get our real reaction. It was a subtle approach. This was the first time I had ever gotten that.”

Without wanting to give too much away, wealth is as much the enemy as any character, which is nice. It’s interesting how the villains always used to have a Russian accent, then they had to be Arab, and now “they’re just rich people,” Turner says. “It’s much better, much less racist.”

This is Turner’s first big role in a while, though she will soon begin filming the live-action Tomb Raider movie, directed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge for Prime Video, in which she plays Lara Croft. The training has been extremely intense — eight hours a day, five days a week — since she finished filming Steal. She had never worked out before in her life – on Game of Thrones, the most physical thing she had to do was get beaten up. “It’s so nice to learn how to throw a punch, not just take it,” she said recently.

Game of Thrones has been a difficult experience, although she now describes it in a somewhat less painful voice as being “thrown in at the deep end”. Sansa Stark was a pivotal part – the eldest daughter of Eddard, Sean Bean, head of the House of Stark, and she was constantly on screen, and there was a great deal of family drama hanging over the veracity of her disorder. She never went to drama school, and although she was a member of the children’s Playbox Theater Company in Warwick, she still felt self-conscious about those early seasons.

“I learned how to act on that set, and now I think: This is not how I do it. This is not what I do these days. It’s so embarrassing. Imagine if you were learning to sing, and all your lessons were filmed and broadcast. It’s just an uncomfortable experience. I think the imposter syndrome is still there. But I don’t think there’s any actor who doesn’t suffer from it.”

It’s been an incredible learning curve, given the quality of the cast, and as many demands on a 14-year-old who’s never done it before as on a 73-year-old who trained with Laurence Olivier. “Having an aristocratic background, like Sansa, and coming into the scene, and having to control these experienced actors, was really funny. It just seemed so weird and so wrong.”

Even before the show had a large following, “there was a fierce fan culture around it,” she recalls. (This was so noticeable that the author, George R.R. Martin, appeared at a book festival once and had more than one audience question: What are you doing wasting your time at a book festival? You won’t live forever, and you need to write more books.) “Fans have an infectious energy,” Turner says. “Once you feel their enthusiasm, it makes you work 10 times harder than you otherwise would. You just don’t want to let them down.”

Game of Thrones arguably defined the entire 2000s, and once it ended, Turner was billed as box office gold, but of the kind: “I was sent a lot of period dramas, about princesses who start out weak and end up learning and developing and growing into power. I had to separate myself from all of that. After Game of Thrones ended, I didn’t know what had happened and what had happened. I needed to discover who I was.”

At the end of that run, she was cast as Jean Gray in the X-Men movie, and that, again, carried a lot of weight of fan expectation, and the world was already built and people were invested in it. “Also a very important part of being an actor is to live a life so that you have experiences that you can draw from. I remember having to act in love before I fell in love. I thought: ‘Okay, I guess I’ll just do this.’ And then suddenly, when I first fell in love, then I knew this feeling. That’s part of the work – to sit with the discomfort we feel so we can bring it to the table.

She got engaged to American singer Joe Jonas when she was 21 years old, then moved to the United States and had two children in a hurry – her first daughter when she was 24 years old, and the second when she was 26 years old. “It’s really nice,” she says. “I don’t worry about my body clock and all that stuff.” “At the time, it seemed like the right break to focus on me, because I’d been a character for so long. Getting along and being at home was great. But the flip side of that, and Covid didn’t help, was that this was a big break from career. And I had to try to rebuild, in a way. You don’t realize how important momentum is in a career, and I put it on hold a little bit,” she says.

She and Jonas separated two years ago, and she and her daughters returned to the UK, just as green shoots were beginning to emerge in the film industry, after the double whammy of the post-pandemic and the post-writers strike. “The state of our industry is slowly improving, especially in the UK,” she says. As much as Steal appears to be a return to the screen for Turner, it was filmed in east London, where the clunky streets contrast against the backdrop of gleaming skyscrapers, effortlessly making the story’s point of wealth decline, while also seeming quintessentially British.

As a viewer, Turner’s favorite genre is romantic comedies, and never having a comedic role, she is always “drawn to characters who are going through some kind of terrible pain. The higher the stakes, the higher the drama, the more it feeds it.” And this is what she wants to do next: “I actually think comedy is a lot harder than drama. With drama, you make it real to yourself and then you live in it. But with comedy, it’s about timing and presentation. There’s a certain way you have to do it in order to communicate. It’s more scientific.” It’s hard to imagine no In crises, but in theft – and I don’t think this spoils anything – life is hard but it’s harder.

Steal is available on Prime Video starting Wednesday January 21.