After teenage years that shot her to stardom, followed by a soaring career throughout her twenties, PORTER’s latest cover star Sophie Turner speaks candidly about the pressures she has faced, the impact the media has had on her personal life, and what she hopes her thirties will bring.
Sophie Turner on what she hopes her thirties will bring: “I just want to have some peace in my thirties. I feel like it’s been really hectic for a long time and I’m ready to not have that anymore. Just settle a bit. We’ll see if that happens.”
On how she was treated during Game of Thrones: “Because the subject matter was so heavy, people felt like they could talk to me like an adult. I think I’ve been an adult for a really long time. The way you’re treated outside of your job is also as an adult, when you’re still a 13-year-old girl, and that’s hard. On the job, I felt like an equal to my peers. But starting in the industry young is not that fun for life outside of set.”
On media attention: “With social media, with the tabloids, you can’t, as a kid, process that sort of attention on you or the criticism. The scrutiny starts and it doesn’t stop. […] [It’s a] very weird state to live in, because nothing’s sacred. There’s no room for mistakes. You have to know that everything you do could come out at some point.”
On speculation about her life: “It’s a total fishbowl. And people take so much as fact these days. Any article comes out, people go ‘Right, that must have happened’. […] You feel like you’re gagged because silence is always the way to let something die out. But it means that you can’t stand up for yourself ever, so there’s a feeling of helplessness and shame.”
On landing the role of Lara Croft in Prime Video’s blockbuster new Tomb Raider series, created and written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge: “God, I was over the moon. It’s very different to the roles that I normally play. I’m not normally seen as an action girl or strong in who she is as a person. I often play characters that are constantly questioning themselves. It’s very refreshing to do something different.”
On work opportunities after Game of Thrones: “I think I had a bit of an identity crisis and I needed to step away entirely for a couple of years from that world. It was like a death, that show finishing. We all had to go away and process it a bit. I needed time to figure out who I was, what I wanted, who I was as an actor.”
On her own resilience: “As stressed as I am, I know I can get through it. That’s the good thing about having a relatively hard twenties – I learned that I can survive a lot. I’m like, there’s pressure, there’s stress, but I’ve been through worse. I have to remind myself that we’re very malleable and we can take on a lot more than we think we can.”
On how she copes during difficult times: “I bury myself in the stuff that actually matters. I don’t read the internet, I don’t look myself up, otherwise that would absolutely kill me. When everything comes out in the press and it feels like it’s so big, it’s like, let me go and focus on somebody else’s life for a bit. Being around people that I love and realizing that, if it’s not in their realm, then it doesn’t fucking matter.”
On juggling work and family: “The mum guilt is there forever. I work all week and then on the weekends, I’ll spend all day with my kids each day. But if I go out for lunch with a friend, I will run back home because my heart is sinking that I’ve left them. […] I mean, I haven’t seen my friends or I haven’t gone on a date in weeks, months! I just sack off parts of my life sometimes. I only have the capacity for work and family right now. But I’m working on it. I’ll get there.”
On being a role model for her daughters: “In order to be a great role model for them, I have to have a passion for myself. I love that they see me going out to work every day and working my arse off.”
On what motherhood has taught her: “My capability to beat a bitch up if they come near my child.”
[Photo Credit: Benjamin Werner, Courtesy of Porter Magazine]
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