Sansa Stark on Game of Thrones, played by Sophie Turner, no doubt has an impressive character arc. She has played both a blushing bride and an angry one married off against her will, not once, but twice.
Over the last season, her character has grown from the reticent girl to a powerful woman. Circumstances might have forced Sansa to grow up too soon, but she continues to hold her own as the matriarch of the Stark family.
A different direction
The show deviated from the books during the course of the seasons, and Sansa’s character too is drastically different. “It’s exciting because you hear whispers and I obviously Wikipedia it to find out what happened to her. This time around, it’s exciting to know what’s going to happen and I don’t know whether the creators of the show, David and Dan, are going to take a different direction to the one George (RR Martin) wants to take. It is scary, but exciting,” she says.
A head on a spike
Sophie was just over 12 when she auditioned for the show. Talking about the experience, she recalls, “It was just make-believe for me at that point. I hadn’t read the script. I didn’t know what any of it meant.
At that time, I didn’t even know what kind of show it was. The scene I auditioned with, I think, was the
one when Sansa sees her dad’s head on the spike for the first time. I remember having a Red Bull in the audition scenes and ‘high-fiving’ everyone afterwards.”
Through the seasons
Turner was a sprightly 13-year-old when she started appearing on the show. Today, at the age of 20, she says that “nothing really has changed” despite the fact that her parents don’t come to the set anymore, and that she doesn’t need to be tutored on the set. “Even though the show was super successful, it happened gradually...none of us really noticed. My parents stopped coming to the set when I was 16. They were not like stage moms and dads, and they weren’t you know around me 24x7 telling me what to do. They just kind of were in the background,” she adds.