Game of Thrones is over, and the cast members are moving on. But as Sophie Turner told The Hollywood Reporter, it’s gonna be a long while before she can really let go of Sansa Stark, if she ever can. “I haven’t put her away at all,” she said. “It’s her resilience and her strength that I’m going to carry with me. I’ve never felt more empowered as a character than I have with Sansa. I think she’ll stay with me for the rest of my life. All my formative years were spent playing Sansa. I think even if I tried, I couldn’t shake her off.”
Does that mean she might return as Sansa for a spinoff or sequel sometime in the future? According to Turner, probably not.
It’s time for me to say goodbye. She’s ended up in a place that I’m so happy with. I don’t know. It would be different if someone actually came and said, “We want to do a Sansa spinoff show,” but I’m pretty sure I’d say no. It’s been 10 years of watching this character grow, and she’s at her peak right now. I’m sure if she carried on and did a spinoff show, it would just be downhill from there. She’d have to go through some other terrible traumas or something, and I don’t want to do that.
HBO has been firm that it doesn’t want to do any kind of sequel show, but that hasn’t stopped people from dreaming, particularly with so many of the endings for characters being open-ended. Arya in particular has an ending that just begs for a sequel, but as Queen in the North, Sansa could get up to plenty, too.
That said, I agree with Turner that we could all use some time away — best to focus on HBO’s upcoming prequel show, which is set thousands of years before any of our favorite characters were born — but a decade from now, who knows?
Speaking of that ending, what did Turner think of it? “I really loved that the story begins with the Starks and ends with the Starks,” she said. “I liked that Jon [Kit Harington] had to be the one to kill Daenerys [Emilia Clarke]. Overall, I liked it.
The thing is that for 10 years, everyone had an idea in their heads of what it was going to be and what they’d like it to be, and it’s never going to be that thing. It’s always going to be something that people don’t expect. For me, I loved it, especially because of the way Sansa finished. It just felt like it was what her character deserved and wanted and needed all those years. She ended up in the place. She was always supposed to be in Winterfell, at home, and she’s incredibly capable of ruling over there. It just felt right for her.
Funnily enough, Sansa’s coronation as Queen in the North was the first thing Turner shot for season 8. “It helped with shooting all the scenes with Dany where she’s very much protecting her home,” Turner explained. “Winterfell felt more like it was mine than ever. So I became even more defensive in those scenes with Dany.”
Having them face off against each other was just amazing, because these women are stubborn as hell, and they won’t back down. So it was always going to be very, very interesting to see how they interacted with one another. I know that if Dany had different intentions or if things went differently, then they would be probably friends in another world, in another time. I know that they would empower each other. But unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
And the last scene she shot? The sequence in the Dragonpit where the lords and ladies pick Bran to be king. “We were in Spain, it was something like a five- or six-day shoot, a ton of characters, and it was boiling hot. I just remember being incredibly conflicted and being like, ‘I might faint, so I would like to wrap, but I also never want to wrap. I want to keep doing the scenes for the rest of my life’…I loved the fact that my last line in the whole series was, ‘The North will remain an independent kingdom as it was for thousands of years.’”
Having Sansa rule the North is indeed a fitting end to her story, although there was a contingent of fans who wish she had lobbied for the top job. “I don’t think Sansa would want to be queen of the Seven Kingdoms,” Turner replied. “I don’t think she would’ve been good at it because she would’ve spent all of her time in the North and concentrating on the North. That’s where her heart lies and has always been.”
What’s next for Sansa? What can you imagine?
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