With the Season 7 premiere of Game of Thrones quickly approaching (hurry up, July 16!), I’m sure fans will be surprised to find that Sophie Turner’s recent interview with the Sunday Times is more of an honest confession about the sexual education she’s received from the show than a standard publicity push. The 21-year-old HBO actress began playing Sansa Stark when she was only 13 years old, so many of the scripts doubled as informal health classes.
“The first time I found out about oral sex was reading the Game of Thrones script,” she said. “I was 13. I said, ‘Wow! People do that? That’s fascinating.’ I guess that was my sex education. Being on the Game of Thrones.”
Besides maturing at a much faster rate than most teenagers, Sophie also dealt with the controversy surrounding a sexual assault scene in Season 5. “Sexual assault wasn’t something that had affected me or anybody I knew, so I was pretty blasé about the whole thing,” she said. “Naively so. And then I shot the scene, and in the aftermath there was this huge uproar that we would depict something like that on television. My first response was like, maybe we shouldn’t have put that on the screen at all.”
Despite some backlash, Sophie decided it was high time to address the issue head on. “The more we talk about sexual assault the better, and screw the people who are saying we shouldn’t be putting this on TV and screw the people who are saying they’re going to boycott the show because of it,” she said.
“This sort of thing used to happen and it continues to happen now, and if we treat it as such a taboo and precious subject, then how are people going to have the strength to come out and feel comfortable saying that this has happened to them?” Turner added.
I couldn’t agree more. Count me in for a season that hopefully delivers even more solid content.