Sophie Turner

In 2011, Sophie Turner joined a vanguard of talented, mostly British and Irish unknowns breaking out on HBO's phenomenal fantasy series "Game of Thrones" (2011- ). A U.K. native, she began acting when she was only three years old with the well-regarded, Warwick-based Playbox Theatre Company. She long dreamed of making a career in drama but brought no professional credits to her auditions for the much-anticipated HBO series, come audition time. Wielding mesmerizing pale-gray eyes, she brought innocence, hauteur and tragic delusion to the in-over-her-head princess Sansa Stark as her arc took dark turns. Due to the exposure from "GoT," Turner landed her first feature film lead in the indie psychological thriller "Another Me" (2013). Like so many of her heretofore-unknown castmates, Turner made instant waves across the international entertainment landscape, with critics and fans recognizing her as a talent on the rise. Born Feb. 21, 1996, in Northampton, U.K., Turner moved with her family to Warwick two years later. At age three, the precocious child was already participating in productions at Warwick's renowned youth theater, the Playbox Theatre Company. She remained active with Playbox through her youth and further honed her talents by concocting and staging less official productions with friends through her years at Warwick Prep School and, later, Kings High School. In 2010, Turner joined a veritable army of Irish and British actors recruited for HBO's ambitious project "Game of Thrones." The epic fantasy adventure, based on George R.R. Martin's best-selling series of novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, chronicled the power struggle for the eponymous Iron Throne, the seat of power on the mythical continent of Westeros. Comprised of various fiefdoms and family dynasties, the players in the multi-sided gambit of violence and political intrigue were the usurping Baratheons, the wealthy Lannisters, the island-dwelling Greyjoys, and the noble Starks, a clan from the rugged northern region of Westeros. With the series' ballyhooed spring 2011 premiere, Turner joined the voluminous cast as the starry-eyed princess of the Stark clan who longs to be a queen, Sansa. She took her character from spoiled brat to fraught captive as Sansa followed her father Ned Stark (Sean Bean) to court to serve King Robert Baratheon; coquettishly wooed the king's snooty heir Joffrey; witnessed her father's murder; and became veritable hostage to the Lannisters, forced to disown her family and living in constant fear. Like the other newcomers in the cast, Turner became an overnight heartthrob in fanatical genre entertainment communities. In 2012, she won her second major credit with the dark indie feature "Another Me" (2013). Supported by an estimable cast that included Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Rhys Ifans, Turner took the film's lead as a high school student grappling with eerie mounting evidence she has a doppelganger plotting to usurp her life. She followed this with a leading role in the action comedy "Barely Lethal" (2015) as a teenage secret agent; the following year, Turner stepped into the iconic comic book role of Jean Grey for "X-Men: Apocalypse" (2016). She next starred in the title role of the small-town thriller "Josie" (2017) and in romantic comedy-drama "Time Freak" (2018). Just after "Game of Thrones" came to the end of its run, Turner reprised her role as Jean Grey in the final X-Men film, "Dark Phoenix" (2019).