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Sophie Turner has a screwball comedy vibe in real life – elegant trouser suit, arch but friendly expression, perfect hair, she looks ready for some whipsmart repartee and a sundowner. She seems very comfortable in her own skin, which is unusual anyway when you’re not quite 30, but especially incongruous given her various screen personas: first, in Game of Thrones. Thirteen when she was cast as Sansa Stark, 14 when she started filming, she embodied anxious, aristocratic self-possession at an age when a regular human can’t even keep track of their own socks. Six seasons in, arguably at peak GoT impact, she became Jean Grey in X-Men: Apocalypse, a role she reprised in 2019 for Dark Phoenix, action-studded and ram-jammed with superpowers.
Now she’s the lead in Steal, a Prime Video drama about a corporate heist, though that makes it sound quite desk and keyboard-based when, in fact, it is white-knuckle tense and alarmingly paced. The villains move in a malevolent swarm like hornets; hapless middle managers are slain almost immediately; it’s impossible to tell for the longest time whether we’re looking at gangster thugs or hacking geniuses, motivated by avarice or anarchy. It’s a first-time screenplay by novelist Sotiris Nikias (who writes crime under a pseudonym, Ray Celestin), and it feels original, not so much in the action and hyperviolence as in the trade-offs it refuses to make: whatever explosions are going on, however much chasing around a dystopian pension-fund investment office, you still wouldn’t call it an action drama. It has a novelistic feel, like characters from a David Nicholls book woke up in Die Hard, and there’s a constant swirl, as you try to figure out who’s the assailed and who’s the assailant.
The central point is Turner’s performance as Zara, office drone cum action hero – by turns petrified, sleuthing, exhausted, baffled. “There’s so much betrayal, the stakes are so high, you can’t prep the feeling,” she says, explaining that, however much research she does ahead, her decisions are always made in the moment. “I don’t even remember what happens in the script! You think you have a grasp on who is who, the power dynamics and who they are as a person, then the next episode, you’ve got it wrong, it’s a whole other game. It’s a constant puzzle-solver.”
Her character is so much more than a damsel in distress, with traces of nihilism and “a lot of rage and sorrow”, she says. “So many of the reasons why Zara does what she does is because she’s had to grow up with an alcoholic, abusive mother.” The director had a cat-and-mouse game going with the cast – the villains have elaborate but quite subtle prosthetics, so all their faces seem slightly off but it’s not obvious why, as if they were rendered by an amateur sculptor. The rest of the cast saw that disguise for the first time as they started shooting, and were as disoriented as the viewers, Turner says. The mood is one of deliberate, chaotic menace. “Take one was a surprise for all of us,” says Turner. “They wanted to get our genuine reaction. It was quite method. It was my first time really having that.”
Without wanting to give too much away, wealth is as much the enemy as any character, which is pretty zeitgeisty. It’s interesting how bad guys used to always have a Russian accent, then they had to be Arabs, and now “it’s just rich people”, Turner says. “It’s much better, much less racist.”
This is Turner’s first big role in a while, though she’s soon to start filming the live-action Tomb Raider, made by Phoebe Waller-Bridge for Prime Video, playing Lara Croft. The training has been absolutely intense – eight hours a day, five days a week – since she finished shooting Steal. She’d 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 quite nice to learn how to throw a punch and not just take it,” she said recently.
Game of Thrones had been a trial by fire, though she describes it now with a marginally less painful-sounding “thrown in at the deep end”. Sansa Stark was a pivotal part – the eldest daughter of Sean Bean’s House of Stark head Eddard, she was on screen continually, a huge amount of dynastic drama hanging on the credibility of her turmoil. She’d never been to drama school, and even though she’d been a member of the children’s Playbox Theatre Company in Warwick, she still feels self-conscious about those first seasons.
“I learned how to act on that set, and now I’m thinking: that’s not how to do it. That’s not what I do these days. It’s very embarrassing. Imagine if you were learning to sing, and all your lessons had been filmed and broadcast. It’s just an uncomfortable experience. I think the imposter syndrome remains. But I don’t think there’s any actor who doesn’t have that.”
It was an incredible learning curve, given the quality of the cast, and that as many demands might be made of a 14-year-old who’s never done it before as of a 73-year-old who trained with Laurence Olivier. “Having an aristocratic background, as Sansa, and coming into a scene, having to command authority over these very seasoned actors, it was really funny. It felt so foreign and so wrong.”
Even before the show got its mass following, “there was such a fierce fan culture around it”, she remembers. (This was so marked that the author, George RR Martin, appeared at a book festival once and more than one of the audience questions was to the effect of: what are you doing wasting your time at a book festival? You’re not going to live for ever, and you need to write more books.) “The fans have a contagious energy,” says Turner. “Once you feel their enthusiasm, it makes you work 10 times harder than you would have done. You just don’t want to let them down.”
Game of Thrones arguably defined the entire 2010s, and once it finished, Turner was considered box-office gold, but to a type: “I got sent so many period dramas, about princesses who start off weak and end up learning and developing and growing into strength. I had to separate myself from all that. After Game of Thrones finished, I didn’t know what was up and what was down. I needed to discover who I was.”
At the tail end of that show, she was cast as Jean Grey in X-Men, and that, again, carried a huge weight of fan expectation, the world already built and people so invested in it. “Also a really important part of being an actor is to live a life so you have experiences to draw on. I remember having to act being in love before I’d ever been in love. I thought: ‘OK, I guess I’ll just do this.’ And then suddenly, when I’d been in love for the first time, then I knew the feeling. That’s part of the job – to sit in the discomfort of feeling so that we can bring it to the table.”
She got engaged to the American singer Joe Jonas when she was 21, moved to the US, had two children in an awesome hurry – her first daughter when she was 24, her second at 26. “It’s really nice,” she says. “I’m not worrying about my biological clock and all that sort of stuff.” At the time, she says, “it just felt like the right break to focus on me, because I’d been a character for so long. Nesting and being at home was amazing. But the flipside of it, and Covid didn’t help, was that this was a big break from the career. And I’ve had to try to rebuild, in a way. You don’t realise how important momentum is in a career, and I stalled it a bit.”
She and Jonas divorced two years ago, and she and her daughters returned to the UK, just as green shoots started to appear in the film industry, after the post-pandemic, post-writers’ strike double whammy. “The state of our industry is slowly getting a little bit better, especially in the UK,” she says. As much as a return to the screen, Steal feels like a homecoming for Turner – filmed in east London, the down-at-heel streets strike a contrast against the shiny skyscraper backdrop, effortlessly making the wealth-is-decay point of the story, while also looking quintessentially British.
As a viewer, Turner’s favourite genre is romcom, and she’s never really had a comic role, always “drawn to characters who are going through some sort of terrible anguish. The more high-stakes, the more high drama, the more I feed off it.” That’s what she wants to do next: “I actually think comedy is a lot harder than drama. With drama, you make it real for yourself then you just live in it. But with comedy, it’s about timing, delivery. There’s a certain way that it has to be done in order for it to connect. It is more scientific.” It’s hard to imagine her not in a crisis, but in Steal – and I don’t think this spoils anything – life is tough but she’s tougher.
Steal is on Prime Video from Wednesday 21 January.
