Sophie Turner on Sansa showing people what she could do in Season 6

In Season 6, Sansa Stark may have had her best year on Game of Thrones yet—she broke free from her captivity at Winterfell, helped plan the attack on the Boltons, and schemed to get herself installed in a leadership position. Actress Sophie Turner agrees, as she revealed in a lengthy podcast interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

"From day one, I always saw her as a very strong, very clever girl. Yes, she was kind of blinded by this fairytale of King’s Landing and the capital and being queen — and, I mean, what 13-year-old isn’t or wouldn’t be? I was always like, ‘Okay, and then there’s gonna be a point where she finally uses everything — all of that knowledge that she’s soaked up — and uses it to her advantage. And I think season six was the season that she really showed people what she could do and she utilized those skills."

Turner ruminates on quite a bit in the interview, including the very early days of the show. HBO’s casting people visited her school when she was 13, and she auditioned with friends at the behest of her drama teacher. At first, she didn’t think she would get the part—she didn’t even bother telling her mom about her audition initially, and knew so little of the show that she called it “Three Kings” for a while—but once it was narrowed down to her and a few other finalists, she started to get her hopes up. And then, “My mom woke me up one morning and was like, ‘Good morning, Sansa,’ I woke up and was like, ‘No!!!’ and just started crying. It was a really good day.”

The rest is history, but it pays to remember that Game of Thrones didn’t come out of the gate a phenomenon. It had to build.

"None of us really knew at that point whether it was gonna be big or not. It really nearly didn’t get made. We really didn’t know. I think it was only about the third season that it started to pick up its momentum. I mean, people watched it, but it wasn’t the huge thing that is now, I suppose, until around the third or fourth season."

Turner also had nothing but great things to say about her onscreen sister Maisie Williams, who plays Arya. The two were particularly close in the early days, when they were young and a little “isolated” from the rest of the cast. They even developed secret hand signals they would use at table reads when the older cast members would play out the more violent and sexual stuff. “She really is like a sister to me,” Turner said.

They also shared the common experience of undergoing adolescence while becoming celebrities, which according to Turner could be trying.

"A lot of it was to do with growing up in the public eye, going through puberty and all of a sudden I didn’t have time to go to my ballet classes and I didn’t have time to go to gymnastics classes — and I love pasta. And so the most difficult part of it was body confidence and that kind of thing. It can really get you down when, like, thousands of people are commenting, ‘Oh, Sansa put on 10 pounds!’ So when I got X-Men, it really was such a blessing in disguise when they said, ‘We’re gonna get you a trainer.’ I was like, ‘I hate you, please don’t do this to me.’ But I got the trainer, I got on a diet and it changed my entire mentality, everything. It really kind of got me out of this rut that I’d been in."

Turner is 20 years old now, and has played many adult scenes as Sansa. The most controversial came in Season 5, when Ramsay Bolton married Sansa and raped her on their wedding night. While Turner said that she can “separate myself from [Sansa],” she described the shooting of that scene as “a very awkward, intense experience.” Still, she was happy with how the scene turned out, and with the conversation it started.

"I thought it was really good that we had a dialog going, whether people were complaining about the show or not…Our show isn’t a show that wants to distract from the horrors of the real world. The show is loosely based on the War of the Roses and medieval times, and that stuff did happen and continues to happen. And so it would almost be an injustice to ignore that completely. It wouldn’t feel true and it wouldn’t feel right. I think we did it in a tasteful way that isn’t overexposing anything or dumbing it down, dulling it down. I think we did it justice."

To end on a tonic, Turner confirmed that the only time she’s really been scared on the set of Game of Thrones was when Sansa had to sing a hymn in front of people in Season 2’s “Blackwater,” since she “can’t even sing in the shower without cringing at myself.” As for scenes she loved doing, she particularly enjoyed the scene where Sansa kills Ramsay (she praised director Miguel Sapochnik up and down for directing “Battle of the Bastards,” for which she apparently recorded an effusive DVD commentary), and when Sansa and Jon reunited at Castle Black, which she “bawled [her] eyes out” when she read. “It was a bit of good news the Starks…it meant a lot.”

We’ll continue to watch Turner evolve as an actress and Sansa as a character in Game of Thrones Season 7.