sophie turner
Has a dark side rising…
The Game Of Thrones star is on fire right now.
Westeros-watchers, take heart: you won’t be alone in your feels when Game Of Thrones climaxes next year. “When it’s done, it’s going to feel like a death in the family,” says Sansa Stark actor Sophie Turner, who joined the show many blood-chilling revenge kills ago in 2009, aged 13.
Yet while we wait to see whether Sansa’s upgrade from dove to wolf will meet a happy or horrific end, a phoenix will rise, darkly. After her feature debut in doppelgänger thriller Another Me, Warwickshire-born Turner made mainstream dents as Hailee Steinfeld’s snark-shooting nemesis in high-school girl-assassin mash Barely Lethal. But the major career mutation came when she was deemed the perfect choice for the young Jean Grey in 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, following in Famke Janssen’s flaming footsteps. True, Bryan Singer’s over-stuffed Days Of Future Past sequel split fans. But most were thrilled by the evolution of Turner’s Grey as she roasted Mr. Apocalypse, eyes ablaze for a brazenly teased reclamation of the comics’ ‘Dark Phoenix Saga’.
“There’s definitely a pressure to do it justice,” notes Turner of the need to rescue the storyline from Brett Ratner’s tepid treatment in 2006’s The Last Stand. But she seems equipped to rise to it. She’s certainly making smart career moves, mixing Thrones/X-Men with indie dramas (small-town thriller Josie) and bigger projects (Asa Butterfield-starring ‘sci-fi romcom’ Time Freak). And she’s flexing a savvy mix of research and enthusiasm on Dark Phoenix, former X-Men writer/producer Simon Kinberg’s first directing gig. Besides studying schizophrenia to help understand Jean, she thrills at the prospect of leading a femalecentric X-movie with Jessica Chastain: “It’s really interesting to have those two characters be kind of the two biggest characters and both be female and so layered and so complex.”
With such challenges and chances on-hand, it’s no wonder the 21-year-old resisted partying while making Phoenix, reasoning, “I was like, ‘I cannot mess this up with a hangover.’” Not to worry: if
Dark Phoenix soars, we’ll all be toasting Turner.
ETA | 2 NovEmbEr / X-mEN: DArk PhoENiX oPENs This wiNTEr.