The role that gave Sophie Turner imposter syndrome: “I shouldn’t be here”
As long as you’re not scared of dragons, very violent weddings or people that can only say the word ‘Hodor’ then Game of Thrones is probably as good a place as any to have an education in acting. That’s where Emilia Clarke, Kit Harrington and Sophie Turner started off after all, and they’ve not done too badly out of it.
Turner especially has recently been making news after she was cast as Lara Croft in Phoebe Waller-Bridges’ Tomb Raider reboot set to hit screens late next year courtesy of Prime Video. Always a tough bit of casting due to nerdy male video games fans throwing tantrums over whether or not the lead actor embodies what is essentially just a collection of pixels well enough, Turner is already catching some flak.
She’s unlikely to let it bother her too much though and it’s not like she doesn’t have experience where huge franchises are concerned. She’s been involved in two X-Men movies as the mutant Jean Grey, firstly X-Men: Apocalypse in 2016 and then again in Dark Phoenix three years later.
Although the latter movie bombed in a huge way it was enough to show Turner could do it on the big screen as well as on TV, where she was an integral part of Game of Thrones for eight years as Sansa Stark, winning an Emmy award nomination for her performance during the show’s final season.
Turner getting cast in these sizable roles still gets to her however as she struggles with imposter syndrome. For her part in X-Men in particular when she lined up alongside the likes of Jennifer Lawrence and Michael Fassbender, she told Net-a-porter at the time: “I felt like I’d won a contest. Every time I was on set, I thought: ‘I shouldn’t be here’. It was mad to have one-on-one scenes with Jess (Chastain) or Jen or Michael.”
‘Jean Grey’ is a character in the Marvel series who initially has telekinetic powers but then develops the power of telepathy under the stewardship of Professor X, becoming essentially the most powerful of all the X-Men.
And Turner is aware of the need for awareness when it comes to looking after issues with the mind, saying of her character’s role in the movies: “There are very clear mental health undertones to it. There’s a loss of control over her mind and her powers, representative of schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder and addiction.”
Over the past few years Turner has concentrated on independent films and TV projects; last year she starred in the ITV drama Joan, playing a diamond thief in the show based on real life and set in the 1980s. Turner received acclaim for her performance in the series and should go on to rediscover her former global fame with her new job, stepping into Angelina Jolie and Alicia Vikander’s shoes on Tomb Raider.
In August this year she also appeared in a low budget movie called Trust, the story of a Hollywood actress who gets embroiled in a scandal and does a runner to a remote cabin, only to find herself in danger. It did not do well to say the least. She’ll be hoping her work in another heist-based TV series, this time called Steal fares rather better when it appears on Prime Video later this year.
She’ll also be teaming up once again with Game of Thrones star Kit Harrington in a new horror called The Dreadful.
