When an actor is perfect for a role, it becomes increasingly difficult to for viewers to separate them from their character in a series. Likewise, even the actors themselves struggle identifying where their character ends, and they begin at the end of the day. For almost a decade, we've seen Sophie Turner transform before our eyes into the elegant, empowered, and (maybe) sinister Sansa Stark on arguably the world's most television series, Game of Thrones. And now, much like her fans, she's found that the lines between imaginary and reality are constantly blurring.
The 21-year-old tells W Magazine in a new interview that oftentimes fans only refer to her as her GOT character, and she has fun watching their reactions when they realise it's just normal Sophie Turner in front of them. "I have had people come up to me and think I am Sansa and treat me as such. I’ve had a few greetings as ‘Lady Stark,’" she says. And it goes deeper than physical appearance. She says that they even expect her to mirror the same icy personality as Sansa. "It might be quite jarring to them because they come up to me and expect a stoic, cold person," she says. "And then they see me in shitty shorts and muddy trainers, and they are like, ‘Oh, she definitely doesn’t have handmaidens.’"
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But Turner doesn't annoyed, because the exact same thing happens to her. "She’s a project that I really feel is part of me now," Turner says of Sansa. "Everything that happens to her affects me. I have kind of been living through two people for the past eight years."
Turner was only 13 at the time of her auditions (the same age as Sansa is in the first episode) and despite the intense script, it sounds like the one thing she was most hesitant about dying her hair red. "Being a thirteen-year-old girl and going red, of course you kind of get mercilessly teased about it, but I spoke to the producers before I got the role and they explained to me that it is so integral to the part and her ancestry and it's a subliminal message to the audience about her mother and Robb and then Ayra’s closeness to Jon and her father. Once they explained, I realised it was kind of amazing that for my first role, I got to transform myself.”
“That was my version of rebellion, I guess," she adds. "My parents are pretty happy that I didn’t go black hair and get tattoos all over my arms. My rebellion was floor-length skirts and red hair."