Filming has wrapped on the final season of Game of Thrones. Everyone from Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) to Kit Harington (Jon Snow) to Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) have said their goodbyes and contemplated life after the show. Now, speaking to Digital Spy, Sophie Turner describes what it was like to say farewell to Sansa Stark.
"It’s like a divorce, or a death in the family, leaving Sansa behind, and leaving people behind. I think the divorce from the character is the hardest thing for me, because my adolescence has just been ‘Sophie and Sansa’. Sometimes, you get both worlds mixed up. So leaving Sansa behind is like leaving a big part of my growing up behind. A lot of it was influenced by her. So it’s really strange not having that crutch to lean on. But I’ll be fine! I’ll be fine! I promise!"
Ah, but will we?
And while we’re sure the cast members will be fine eventually, as Turner tells it, a lot of them were “in tears, crying” during the lead-up to the end. “It’s been a really strange few months, having everyone wrap in front of us,” she said. “And it really is like each one is kind of dying off… not in the show this time, but in real life. It’s saying goodbye to someone and being like, ‘God, will I ever see them again?'”
"It’s very emotional. But we keep delaying our goodbyes. We keep going, ‘We’ll see you at the wrap party. It’s fine.’ And then we’re like, ‘Well, we won’t say bye now. We’ll say bye at the premiere.’ ‘We won’t say bye then. We’ll say bye at Comic-Con.’ We never want it to be goodbye, really."
Just as it is for a lot of fans, the full reality of Game of Thrones ending hasn’t really sunk in for Turner yet. “I think I’ll only really know how I’m feeling when next year comes about, and I’m not filming Game of Thrones, and I’m looking for a job desperately!”
Turner also clarified some things we’d suspected about her final days on set. Based on the tweet above, we figured she’d had her last day of shooting in May, around the time everyone was filming in Seville. Turner confirmed this to Digital Spy, and talked about another milestone that happened earlier in Northern Ireland. “I wrapped shooting in Spain – like, the whole of Game of Thrones,” she said. “But I remember the first time, when I wrapped in Belfast with the crew that we worked with so often, it was in the Winterfell courtyard.”
"I wasn’t even shooting there, but the director, David Nutter, called me into the courtyard, because he knew it was my last day on set. He said to the whole crew, ‘Sansa Stark is leaving Winterfell for the last time. As you can imagine, I bawled my eyes out."
And it got only got worse:
"Then [showrunners] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] presented each actor with their favourite scene of their character in a storyboard, with a little note on the back. That set me off as well. As soon as they brought that out… And the documentary crew saw me. It was just a nightmare, to be honest – I was just bawling."
I wonder which scene it was?
Best still, she talked briefly about the final scene Sansa was involved in, saying it “took about five days to shoot.” She and her costars were “all quite sweaty, and bored by the end.”
That means the final scene Turner filmed (which is not necessarily the same as the final scene Sansa is in) was a group scene. Again, there were a ton of cast members gathered in Seville around this time, so that makes sense.
Anyway, I’m going to go curl up in a fetal position and mentally prepare myself for all the crying cast members in the behind-the-scenes videos for season 8.
Next: Kit Harington reflects on finishing Game of Thrones: “They were a family and it was my life”
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