Sophie Turner exudes the air of a classic screwball comedy star in everyday life – dressed in a chic pantsuit and sporting an arch yet approachable demeanor, complete with flawless hair, she’s the picture of someone ready for sharp banter and an evening drink. She appears remarkably at ease with herself, which is not only rare for someone not yet thirty, but also somewhat contradictory, considering the range of intense characters she has portrayed on screen. Initially, at the tender age of thirteen, she was cast as Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones, beginning to shoot at fourteen. She portrayed a poised, aristocratic figure, a stark contrast to typical teenage disarray. In the midst of the Game of Thrones saga, at what could be considered the height of its popularity, she transitioned into the role of Jean Grey in X-Men: Apocalypse, a character she continued to explore in 2019 with Dark Phoenix, filled with action and superhuman abilities.
Currently, she stars in Steal, a Prime Video series centered around a corporate heist. Despite its seemingly mundane setting involving desks and computers, the show is intensely gripping and paced with a sense of urgent danger. The antagonists are menacing, swarming like malevolent hornets; the less fortunate middle managers meet their ends swiftly; and for the longest time, it’s unclear whether we’re dealing with mobsters or master hackers, driven by greed or chaos. The screenplay, a debut work by novelist Sotiris Nikias (who adopts the pseudonym Ray Celestin for his crime novels), offers a fresh take not so much through its action or brutality, but through its refusal to make conventional compromises: regardless of the explosions and frantic chases through a dystopian investment firm setting, it steers clear of being pigeonholed strictly as an action drama. It presents a narrative depth akin to a David Nicholls novel set unexpectedly within the confines of Die Hard, keeping viewers constantly guessing the roles of victim and aggressor.
At the heart of the series is Turner’s portrayal of Zara, a character who oscillates between being a terrified office worker and a dynamic action heroine. “The amount of betrayal and the stakes being so high, you can’t just prepare for the emotions,” she explains, noting that her acting choices are spontaneous, regardless of her preparation. “I often forget what’s even in the script! Just when you think you understand the power dynamics and characters, the next episode throws you completely off—it turns into a completely different game. It’s like solving a puzzle continuously.”
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.”
Fatima Clarke is a seasoned health reporter who bridges medical science with human stories. She writes with compassion, precision, and a drive to inform.
