As part of its cover story on Game of Thrones, TIME talked to many of the show’s major cast members, including Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark). Turner had plenty to say about her character’s development, life on the set, and where Sansa could be going.
“I was 13 when I started and the parallels between my and Sansa’s story were amazing,” Turner said. “She was thrown into a world of aristocracy and royalty that she had no idea about and has only really dreamed of…And then she learns how to play the game through actually experiencing it and not through people teaching her what life is really like in that world. The same’s true of me in this business — I had to learn my tricks through working in it as well.”
Happily, Turner wasn’t taking the journey alone. Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) was going through the same kinds of things as her, and the pair were always there for each other when one of the them needed a sympathetic ear. They’ve emerged from the experience the best of friends. “A lot of people think we’re in love!” Turner joked. “We’re kind of joined at the hip and we do literally everything together.”
As for Sansa herself, Turner has enjoyed taking her from “a useless player in the game” to someone with presence and authority, although she sometimes wonders if all the violence and abuse Sansa has encountered over the years will leave her jaded. After all, as she points out, Sansa spent several of her formative years away from her family, and didn’t have “those Stark morals reiterated to her on a daily basis.”
She’s spent so long trying to survive and see her family again — it’s the only thing that’s kept her going and motivated, when so many times, she could have given up. So I think she may change a little, but at the end of the day, I think her heart is still good.
All the same, Turner doesn’t mind if Sansa engages in a little well-earned vengeance, as when she fed Ramsay Bolton to his own hungry dogs. “[I]t was amazing!” she said. “For me as Sophie, it was the most awesome scene, because I’ve been waiting for so long to have my first kill.”
It felt really good to give Sansa back that power that’s been stripped from her. She’s been manipulating people, but very under-the-radar. She’s still suffering through it. So this was the moment where she had all of the power. I’m sure it was intoxicating for her, too, that feeling she’d been craving for so long, and it was intoxicating for me. I loved it! I want more kills!
Sansa’s been involved in some controversial moments over the course of the show, most notably when Ramsay Bolton raped her on their wedding night in season 5. “Things like that did and continue to happen,” she said. “And I feel so passionately about it that when something like that happens onscreen and there is a discussion and there is an uproar, great! Let’s take that discussion and that dialogue and use it to help people who are going through that in their everyday lives. Stop making it such a taboo, and make it a discussion.”
Finally, Turner expressed her hopes for Sansa going forward. Westeros is a tough world, but Turner is holding out hope for a relatively happy ending for her character, preferably one that involves her reuniting with the remaining Starks so they can once again become “one of the most powerful families in the Seven Kingdoms.”
Ideally, I’d like her to get her revenge on Cersei and many of the others who have done her wrong. What I loved about the character and what I didn’t expect was how much she’s been growing. Even if she didn’t get that final end result of being united with her family again, my hope for her is that she continues to keep growing more and more powerful and confident in herself. But in reality, it’s probably not going to happen, and she’s probably going to die! [laughs]”
We’ll see if her dreams come true when season 7 debuts on July 16.
In another interview, this one with Variety, Turner talked about how Game of Thrones, which I remind you she started working on when she was 13 years old, served as her “sex education.” “I’d be doing a read-through and we’d be talking about very graphic stuff,” she said. “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!’”
See, parents? Wait too long to give your kids the talk and they’ll learn everything on TV sets.
