It is mid-May and unseasonably cold in London on the day Sophie Turner and I speak. While it may be grey and somewhat depressing outside, it’s not depressing enough to make the actor yearn for her former life in Los Angeles and Miami. “No, I don’t miss living in America,” she says with a chuckle. “I do miss the sun, but that’s it.”
So what exactly was she happy to be reunited with when she moved back to her rainy (and much maligned) home country in 2023?
“Sarcasm, baked beans on toast, Jaffa Cakes and British chocolate,” she says. “Although the thing that I missed the most was pub culture, especially in spring, when the pubs are rammed and people are spilling out onto the streets and it is all so joyful.
“I love that gathering of people. New York has it, of course, but when I lived in LA, you’d have to drive everywhere. I missed just wandering down the street and seeing a bunch of people chatting at the pub. To me, that’s England.”
Turner has packed a lot into her 30 years. In 2011, aged 15, she was thrust into the spotlight via the plum role of Sansa Stark in the mega-hit Game of Thrones. Then, in 2016, she received a message on Instagram from Joe Jonas of the Jonas Brothers, asking her for a drink.
Unsure whether she’d been catfished, Turner arrived at a north London pub with her older brother in tow. He wasn’t needed and the two young stars began a whirlwind romance that saw her move to the US, marry and become a mother of two, all before turning 27. But the fairytale ending was not to be. The pair separated in 2023 and Turner moved back to London with her daughters.
The actor has previously said that her career “stalled” in the years after having children, but she has certainly found her stride again. Since returning to the UK, she has starred in shows like Joan and Steal, and is now playing Lara Croft in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s small-screen adaptation of Tomb Raider, which will likely come out later this year.
“Right now, my focus is Tomb Raider,” she says. “It has been for quite a while and will be for a while to come. I feel good doing it. I was birthed by Game of Thrones – TV is my bread and butter, and I love developing a character over years. If I hadn’t had Game of Thrones, this would be overwhelming. But it’s a joy.”
Lara Croft has also given Turner the opportunity to experiment with being a brunette for the first time in years. “I’ve been dyeing my hair since I was 13, when I had to go red for Game of Thrones, so I don’t really identify with any hair colour these days, although it’s interesting to see how the world reacts.
“Blonde gets the most positive reaction,” she elaborates. “Red gets less of a reaction, but when there is a reaction it’s pretty over the top. And with brunette you’re a bit camouflaged, which I’m really enjoying. I get recognised less, which is great.”
Turner may be enjoying the anonymity because she hasn’t always had an easy time at the hands of the press and the public. In the wake of her complicated divorce from Jonas, a prevailing online narrative painted him as a diligent, loving father and her as a party-obsessed starlet who couldn’t put her children first.
In an interview with British Vogue in 2024, she said: “It felt like I was watching a movie of my life that I hadn’t written, produced or starred in. It was shocking. I’m still in shock.”
Turner, who’s also talked about how isolated she felt in America, has found acting to be an excellent way of working through the more traumatic events of her 20s. “It is like a catharsis,” she says. “I need to do it creatively to process what’s been going on in my life, and to expel something from me.
“I did a movie a few years ago called Trust, about a girl who had to go into hiding because she was being manipulated by this man she’d had a baby with and needed to protect her child. She had personal things to process – and it felt like an opportunity for me to do that, too.”
It has at times been difficult for Turner to separate herself from the roles she has played, and she explains that spending half her adolescence on the set of Game of Thrones was a discombobulating experience. “I didn’t know who was Sansa and who was Sophie. And I was too young to read the books, so I kind of just developed her over time. I had a big identity crisis when I let her go; I didn’t really know who I was or what I was doing. It was a strange, hard time.”
Equally, Turner’s current life in west London is quite far removed from the tomb-raiding archaeologist she is playing. “[Lara Croft] is so different from me and my personality. Without giving too much away, there is an element of her that can be fairly toxic, but there is also an element of her that is so focused and determined, whereas I have ADHD and can’t complete a task without forgetting about it and doing something else. I am a total worrier and neurotic, which she obviously isn’t, but we’re both obsessed with history.”
As the mother of two young daughters – Willa, 5, and Delphine, 3 – Turner also doesn’t have the time or space to approach her roles with a Daniel Day-Lewis level of reverence and preparation. “Kristen Stewart once said that only men are method actors. Women have to come home and cook their kids’ dinner – and I can’t be a murdering psychopath while I’m making spaghetti, can I?”
Turner is mostly very funny and quite forthright, and I can understand why she might have found California isolating at times. She has that particularly British ability to make a joke out of almost anything. More than once, she hoots with laughter and tells me something I can’t publish, and as we chat I can see why she has such a large group of female friends – and why being close to them again has brought her so much happiness.
“All my best friends are my age and we went to school together and we’re having a year of 30th birthdays – we’re just so happy to be out of the mess of our 20s,” she says. “Each of us has had a mini breakdown but we all feel really positive now. I was very ready to leave that decade of my life behind.”
For her own 30th, Turner threw a big party and says that along with great people and great music, drinks are all you need to make it a success. “You could be in a ballroom or in the park; if you have the tunes and drinks and mates, you’re good.”
She’ll also have a steady supply of dresses for all these 30th birthdays thanks to her role as a Louis Vuitton ambassador (she has been a muse to Nicolas Ghesquière, the company’s artistic director, for nearly eight years). But for all Turner’s dazzling red-carpet outfits, her day-to-day fashion choices are more reflective of a west London mother than a Hollywood star.
“Comfort is always key,” she says. “Some days I like to look like the most tomboyish version of myself – right now I’m wearing cargo pants and an oversized T-shirt – and other times I’m quite dolled up. Mostly, I like simplicity.”
Aside from birthday bashes, Turner has started her new decade with the intention of looking after her mental and physical health, which shouldn’t be too difficult as she goes to therapy regularly and says she is “addicted to the gym”. And while she will be filming for some of the northern hemisphere summer, most of it will be spent with her daughters, which she describes as “wonderful”.
As we say goodbye, Turner tells me to check the weather forecast because she’s pretty sure there’s a heatwave on the way. Turns out she’s right. I just hope she spends some of it in a quintessentially English pub garden.
