LONDON — Sophie Turner is interested in playing complicated, potentially messy characters. The British actor is drawn to women who are forced to prove their own worth, although the parallels between them aren’t always deliberate. In “Steal,” a six-episode limited series on Prime Video that premieres in full on Wednesday, Turner embodies an undeniably chaotic finance worker named Zara.
“Easy women are boring,” she says, speaking from her publicist’s office in London earlier this month. She’s days away from kicking off filming on Prime Video’s forthcoming “Tomb Raider” series, in which she plays video-game icon Lara Croft. The muscles she’s been building for the past year during prep are hidden under a loose sweater, but Turner, 29, carries herself with a sense of confidence that suggests she’s as strong internally as she is on the outside.
“I want really nuanced, layered characters,” she continues. “I want big character changes. I want to see a progression. To be a character who doesn’t know where she’s going, doesn’t know what she wants to be, feels stuck, feels stalled, feels underappreciated — that’s nice for us to see onscreen. I like seeing women at their rawest and most vulnerable. It’s quite liberating to play.”
When we meet Zara, a low-rung worker at Lochmill Capital in London, she’s hungover and scattered. Her workday takes a turn for the worse when a group of thieves hold up the high-rise office and force Zara and her co-worker Luke (Archie Madekwe) to help them steal pension funds. She’s quickly caught up in a complex web of deception, in which she may be complicit.
Playing a character who goes off the rails was cathartic for Turner, who shot the series in 2024 shortly after moving back to England following her messy divorce from pop star Joe Jonas.
“We’re so often not allowed to go off the rails,” she says. “When [you’ve been] in the public eye since you were 13, you’re not allowed to f— up. And as a 13-year-old, you need to be able to f— up in order to be able to progress in any way in life. And those mistakes you make should never be public. You should be allowed to make them and have the room to make them.
“To play a character like Zara, it was like, ‘OK, I’m going give myself the opportunity to be on camera and pretend to do coke.’ It was quite liberating to go, ‘Oh, my God, am I allowed to do this? OK, let’s show that raw side,’” she adds.
It’s hard to talk about “Steal” without giving away its many twists. The thriller aspect was part of what initially captivated Turner, who met with director Sam Miller after reading the scripts. She remembers asking him what he wanted to explore on the show.
“It was basically: What makes good people do bad things?” she says. “And I liked that. This show is also a commentary on the cost of living crisis, the wage gap, what it’s like growing up in an alcoholic, abusive living space. There are so many factors that contribute to Zara doing the things she does and Luke doing the things that he does. It’s a really interesting notion of: How far can we be pushed until we’re forced to do something that we don’t really want to do?”
“Circumstance plays a huge role into people’s decision making,” Madekwe adds, speaking later on Zoom. “We see a lot of that — people feeling stuck, feeling that they have no other options and wanting to do better for themselves. You can have all of the best intentions and do something out of genuine necessity, without truly thinking about the ripple effect. Most of the things these characters do come out of impulse.”
Turner clarifies, not wanting to make the show sound too serious, “It’s all subtly played underneath the action and drama. It’s not too political. It’s really exciting. There’s a bit of escapism in there, but it also feels like it could really happen.”
Much of “Steal” was shot on location in London. The Lochmill Capital interior was a set, but almost everything else was shot in recognizable locales around the city, sometimes late at night. Turner is the only actor I’ve ever interviewed who has admitted to enjoying night shoots.
“It was fun,” she says. “I don’t know why other people don’t like it. It’s like when you’re a kid and you go in for parents’ evening and it’s nighttime at school and you’re like, ‘I shouldn’t be here!’ It feels a bit naughty.”
Turner and Madekwe hadn’t met prior to shooting. Before the production started, Turner was on vacation in Capri when she got a text from her co-star. “He said, ‘Are you in Capri? Someone just said that they saw you. I’m on this beach a two-minute walk away.’ So then we had a whole holiday together and we got to work already best friends.”
“We developed this very real friendship,” Madekwe says. “It meant that we came to set with a dynamic in place. We really needed that because we were shooting in the dead of summer in a boiling hot studio and some of those days were particularly long. We were able to be there for each other and be each other’s morale and that extended into the scenes as well.”
Turner adds, “We totally fell in love with each other on this project, platonically.”
On set, Madekwe was impressed both with Turner’s ability to keep her emotions “simmering beneath the surface” and with the way she approached her job. “She’s so deeply committed to the character and to the work, but I’ve also never been with someone who creates such a happy working environment for the entire crew,” he says. “She says hello to everyone. Remembers everybody’s name. She is the dream No. 1 on the call sheet and she leads by example and sets the tone.”
Like with all of her characters, Turner created an expansive backstory for Zara, who is trapped in a toxic relationship with her alcoholic mother. She can still recount it two years later and it is remarkably detailed, involving Zara’s school history and the psychological reasons why her mom drinks so much.
“It’s nice to have little secrets about the character that the audience doesn’t know and the directors don’t know,” Turner says. “It creates a few more layers and a bit more nuance. I find it really helpful. Anytime I’m doing a character, I have this understanding of what makes them tick. What are their phobias? Do they have any irrational fears? It gives you a broader picture of the character.”
Does she remember any of Zara’s irrational fears? “I’d have to check my notebook,” she says. “I have lots of notebooks from different characters. I like to write their backstory, and then I do journals from their perspective — a journal from when they were 12, and then a journal entry from 25. I have all of it.”
The only one who doesn’t have a notebook on Turner’s shelf is Sansa Stark, whom she played on “Game of Thrones” for eight seasons. “I wish I’d done one for Sansa,” she says. “But I was too young to know that’s what I needed to [do] for a character.”
Sansa was Turner’s first onscreen role and her most pivotal. She was 13 when she was cast and spent her formative years filming the series. She’d been wanting to act for as long as she could remember. “I think my mom put me in classes when I was 3,” she says. “I caught the bug so hard, so fast. When I was 11 — and I remember this because it’s one of those memories that’s etched in there — I said to my mom, ‘I really need to break into the industry as a child because I think it will be easier to stay there.’ But I never had a game plan for it because the ‘Game of Thrones’ audition smacked me in the face.”
Although she loved being part of the show and performing, Turner was faced with significant public scrutiny. She shot scenes that were notably mature for someone her age, including a memorably challenging rape scene. She’s acknowledged dealing with depression and anxiety since her late teens, and she’s brutally honest about seeing a therapist. When the show ended in 2019, Turner was ready to move on with her career. She’s avoided similar shows since.
“I got a lot of period piece offers, but I did not want to do any more period pieces after ‘Game of Thrones,’ mainly because of the temperature,” she says. “You’re always outside and you’re always in a flimsy little cotton dress and there’s mud everywhere.”
She pauses, a twinkle in her eye. “OK,” she continues, “this is the reason I don’t like doing them. You get mud on the bottom of your dress and when you have to go and wee the mud slaps your bum when you pull the dress up. It’s not as glamorous as it seems.”
After “Game of Thrones,” Turner played Marvel superhero Jean Grey in “X-Men: Apocalypse” and “Dark Phoenix,” real-life jewel thief Joan Hannington in the limited series “Joan” and an actor forced to survive a home invasion in last year’s “Trust.” After wrapping “Steal” and an upcoming film called “The Dreadful,” Turner went deep into preparation for “Tomb Raider.” Her take on the character is not “sex bombshell,” as she puts it, and there will be no pointy boobs involved.
“It’s about her and her story and what drives her, rather than what so many people also love about her, which is how hot she is in the games and the movies,” Turner says. “But I really want to show the other side. She’s so unashamedly capable. She is not a woman who hides her strengths at all.”
Training to play Lara has come with an unexpected upside. Turner, who shares two children with Jonas, feels more comfortable walking around the streets of London as a single mom. “I now really feel like I could protect them,” she says. “As a mum, I come up with scenarios in my head and I’m like, ‘OK, if a man jumped out of here what would I do?’ And it’s always like, ‘I just pick the kids up and run. But now it’s changed. My instinct would be to deck him in the face.”
She adds, “I’ve never had to train for anything like this before. In ‘X-Men’ we had to be in good shape, but my character was telekinetic so I didn’t need to do much. I didn’t realize I could push my body that far. I feel like I’ve achieved something even before we’ve started shooting.”
If it seems like Turner hasn’t been in a ton of projects since “Game of Thrones,” it’s because she’s been purposefully discerning. She’s also been focused on raising her kids, who were born in 2020 and 2022.
“I’m not saying yes to anything,” she says. “After I had my kids, I felt like I needed to get my career back on track. And then I went through a very expensive divorce. It’s just now I feel like I’m getting back to where I want to be in terms of being able to pick and choose what I really want to do. And that’s a nice place to be.”
“Steal” is conclusive in its ending, leaving Zara more capable than she was at the beginning of the show. Turner says the high-octane emotional scenes helped her to get out the anger, sadness and frustration she was feeling at the time. “But I don’t know if playing characters trying to find their way in the world necessarily helps me find my way,” she says.
What has helped is therapy.
“I’m figuring it out,” Turner says. “I’m still finding my way, in a good way.”
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