‘Game of Thrones‘ actress, star, and objectively perfect human Sophie Turner has revealed in an interview with The Times that HBO‘s mega-hit show also served as her sex education.
The now 21-year-old actress was just 12 when she auditioned for the part of Sansa Stark, and 15 when it first went to air.
In the six seasons that have followed, her character has gone from bright-eyed child dreaming of marrying the prince and living in a castle, to being emotionally and physically abused by her royal fiancée, to being rescued and manipulated by the creepiest dude in all of Westeros (Littlefinger), to being forcibly married to the most psychopathic dude in all of Westeros (Ramsay Bolton), and ultimately feeding her rapist and abuser to his own rabid dogs. If there’s a villain in ‘Game of Thrones’, Sansa has been under their power at one time or another.
But despite all that her character has been through, tweenage Sophie Turner was fairly innocent about the birds and the bees until the time came for script read-throughs. (Look, I hate the term ‘tweenage’ as much as you do, but the interview doesn’t specify exactly how old she was, so we just have to assume she was around 12 or 13.)
“I’d be doing a read-through and we’d be talking about very graphic stuff,” she told The Times. “The first time I ever found out about oral sex was from reading the script. I was like … ‘Wow! People do that? That’s fascinating!’ I guess that was my sex education. Being on ‘Game of Thrones’.”
She also talked about the extremely weird experience of growing up in the limelight and being contractually obligated to use social media. She said she still struggles with insecurity from online trolls, and “all because of someone’s shitty comment on a picture when I was 16.”
She said that around that age, when she was completing her GSCEs, people started commenting that she was ugly, or fat, or that her skin was bad. “I’m 16 and I don’t have time to work out every day because I’m working a lot, and all of a sudden I gain 5lb and people, like, rip you apart,” she said.
It made her want to quit social media altogether, but the very nature of her work mean she had to keep going with it.
“I’d speak to my parents, speak to my team, and be like, ‘I really don’t want to do social media any more. I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to look at it, I don’t want to be a presence.’ But my team would kind of say to me, ‘Look … This is the modern day. Casting directors want to see how many followers you have and they’ll cast you on that basis.’ It’s written into contracts that in order to promote projects, you have to have social media. So it would be torturous, because I would have to post images. And the social media team at my agency would be like, ‘You have to post every day to keep those followers!’ It was mad. And I would do it. And then I’d obsess over it after I read the first negative comment.”
Have a read of the full interview here.
Photo: HBO.
