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Game of Thrones continues to beat its own peak. As the eighth season of the HBO fantasy series keeps Australian audiences from their regular Monday night activities, doomed princess Sansa Stark almost looked very, very different.
In a recent interview with Porter magazine, actress Sophie Turner claims there was another, more reputable name, in the mix to play Stark but it was Turner’s social media following that landed her the role.
“A lot of what I have achieved is about timing and luck, but it is also, and I hate to say it, about a big social-media following,” says Turner. “I auditioned for a project and it was between me and another girl who is a far better actress than I am, far better, but I had the followers, so I got the job. It’s not right, but it is part of the movie industry now.”
At 14-years-old, Turner didn’t realise how big her star was growing and thus had to be pulled aside and schooled on why she needed to tone down her Instagram account internal dialogue-style captioning. “I was a 15-year-old girl writing rash political stuff that would get a negative reaction and my team would tell me to take it down,” she recalled. “Now I am learning to keep my mouth shut. [Fame] was so gradual that I still treated my life and my social media like I wasn’t in the public eye.”
