Sophie Turner on being Sansa Stark
Sophie Turner graces the cover of the July issue of Nylon Singapore this month, with a feature on being Sansa Stark. We’ve seen a few pictures from the spread recently, but yesterday the full article surfaced online.
In the new interview Sophie talks at length about her portrayal of Sansa Stark and the transformation that her character has gone through, her friendship with Maisie Williams, and her experience working on Game of Thrones.
It isn’t always easy being Sansa Stark, as much of her story has been told through her silence, but Sophie admits that she enjoys the challenge. “I really like the fact that she is quite a silent character. If she had spoken up in court at any point she would have gotten herself killed. She is being compliant with the people she hates just so that she can bide her time and then she can actually get her own back. It’s fun because then a lot of the acting is in the face, and not in the words, which is nice for me to experiment with.”
In Season 4 Sophie was able to experiment even more, as Sansa finally escaped King’s Landing and got to start playing a game of her own.
“This season has been really good for me because Sansa has gone from a vulnerable 13-year-old girl, and she is transformed. She has been learning from al these people at court on how to manipulate others and she is actually putting it into practice now. She is becoming a bit of a dark horse.”
“I had this scene in the most recent episode where I had to lie for Littlefinger during his trial, and at the same time, I had to put on a convincing performance. It was quite difficult but it was a lot of fun. We had a great time filming.”
Sophie didn’t always have such a great time with being Sansa Stark, as her character caught a lot of hate during the first season. “I think it’s because people see their own faults in her character, and they don’t like facing their own weaknesses. I think if anyone was a 13-year-old girl put in her situation, they would probably act exactly the same. When I was younger, Maisie, who plays my sister, and I were in scenes together and people loved her character and they hated mine, and it really used to affect me.”
Sophie and Maisie have become close friends since they started working together on Game of Thrones, but with Arya sailing off the Braavos and Sansa taking on a new persona in the Vale, it’s seeming more unlikely that they’ll get to share a scene again. “It sucks because she is one of my closest friends, but if that’s the way the story is going to go and it’s going to make a good story, then I’m happy with it. Maybe one day they’ll reunite? It might be leading somewhere, who knows?”
Since Sophie was so young when she started on the show, she wasn’t allowed to read the books aside from her own chapters. She says that when the series is over she will go back and read them from start to finish, but it’s hard to know if she would be a fan of the story if she wasn’t involved in it. “The idea of medieval fantasy never quite intrigued me but I think because there has been a lot of hype about it, I may have watched an episode to see whether it got me. Because you’re in it, you have no outside perspective, so I have no idea if it’s actually a good show or not!”
It’s safe to say that the show is good, and that Sophie has learned quite a lot from being surrounded by experienced actors on such a big production, but she hasn’t let it go to her head. “It was very strange when I first started, but now it’s very familiar to me and I feel most at home on a film set. My first day filming ever was with Sean Bean, Peter Dinklage and Lena Headey, and a ton of these great actors doing this big scene. It was so daunting with all the cameras around, and I didn’t realize that people would get you what you wanted – I’d ask ‘please may I go and get a bottle of water,’ and they’d go, ‘No, I’ll get it for you,’ and that was very strange. It’s normal now – but I still get my own bottles of water!”
The July issue of Nylon Singapore is on newsstands now.
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