Ten years later, Sophie Turner still defends Game of Thrones

The English actress says she is “proud” to have played the painful scenes of Sansa Stark, in particular the famous rape sequence of season 5.

She will remain as one of the most striking characters in Game of Thrones.

Sansa Stark has often been undermined by the authors of the HBO series. But in a recent interview for Flaunt Magazine, Sophie Turner defends everything that could have happened to her character, even the famous scene of season 5, in 2015. One of the most controversial scenes in the series: Sansa’s brutal rape just after her marriage to Ramsay Bolton. Despite the outcry she had sparked at the time, Turner affirms that the scene was important and that the series “actually rendered a lot of justice to women”. Sophie Turner explains today:

“I felt – and I still feel ten years later – that Game of Thrones highlighted realities that many people consider unbearable. I totally understand that it could be trigger, but I think that we have done justice to the struggle that women have led for centuries: patriarchy, treatment as objects, constant sexual assaults … other.”

The actress underlines that men still have trouble hearing that almost all the women she knows have been confronted with a form of harassment, “and it is because we are not talking about it enough – we avoid the subject.”

Besides, according to Sophie Turner, that is the problem:

“If Game of Thrones was released today, there would certainly be content warnings. But I am proud to have been part of the series, where we did not hesitate to show the atrocities experienced by women at the time. I am proud to have participated in this conversation”.

Season 5, and in particular the controversial episode Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken, showed Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon) assaulting Sansa while his childhood friend, Theon Grayjoy, was forced to look. This scene, which did not appear in the novels of George Rr Martin, had provoked lively indignation and relaunched the debate on the representation of violence against women in the HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones.