Sophie Turner covers the latest issue of Flaunt, and having looked at the whole editorial, I cannot believe the editors chose THIS photo for their cover. There were like ten better shots, because Sophie is crazy-photogenic. Anyway, Sophie is promoting an array of new projects, because she’s been booked and busy since moving back to the UK a couple of years ago. She had spent a good chunk of her 20s in America, married to Joe Jonas and giving birth to her two daughters. But now she’s divorced and back in the UK and she never wants to leave. Some highlights from her Flaunt interview:

Living in London: She says she couldn’t be happier. She’s surrounded by a close-knit group of friends who she has known since childhood, as well as her two young daughters. “I just feel so at home here; I never want to move again. Living in the States, I didn’t appreciate how much you need friends and family and how integral they are to your wellness until you’re away from them. I came back with an abundance of appreciation for them.”

Motherhood: “Being a mother has affected me more than I can ever say. I can now bring so much of that into my work and into this film [Trust] too.”

On #MeToo: “I was probably 20 or 21 when the #MeToo movement came around. I had a good eight years before that of being in the industry and seeing just how much gets covered up and just how much you can raise awareness, complain, speak to heads of studios—whatever it may be—and your requests or concerns go ignored in the name of making money, basically… I worked with people who I’d seen really bad things happen to and it was just amazing to me at the time the way everyone would turn a blind eye.”

Being a child actor on Game of Thrones & navigating social media: “I think social media was just really becoming a big thing after I started on Game of Thrones, so I got a couple of years of peace and quiet and then I had to adjust. It had such a profound impact on my mental health, like more than I could tell you. It almost destroyed me on numerous occasions.” Turner started to suffer from anxiety, depression, and an eating disorder; she’s spoken previously about how therapy “saved her life.” She still thinks it’s essential. “One of the most important things to me in my life is talking about mental health: it’s vital.”

Social media is more toxic than ever: “I look at the kids who are about to be in the new Harry Potter and I just want to give them a hug and say, ‘Look, it’s going to be okay but don’t go anywhere near [social media]. Stay friends with your home friends, keep living at home with your family, make sure your parents are your chaperones—it’s so important to have that grounding adjacent to the big, crazy stuff that you do.’” What would she do if her own children wanted to follow in her footsteps into acting? “Oh God, they’re not acting!” she bellows, without missing a beat. “Not until they’re at least 25!”

The scenes of sexual violence in Game of Thrones: “When I was younger, I think there was a scene in season one or two where my character narrowly escapes a rape. I didn’t fully understand it…I was trying to figure it out in my young little head.” Later, she was part of one of the show’s most controversial storylines when her character was sexually assaulted at the hands of husband Ramsay Bolton (played by Iwan Rheon). While she says she “had more of a grasp of what was happening” (she was 19 at the time the episode aired) she understood the criticism the episode received. “I did feel—and still do—that Game of Thrones shone a light on things that many people were like ‘Oh god, you can’t show that kind of thing’—and I understand it can be triggering—I totally understand that point of view. But I did feel we were actually doing a lot of justice to women and the fight women have had to fight for hundreds of thousands of years—the patriarchy, being treated as objects, and being constantly sexually assaulted—I don’t think there’s one woman I know who hasn’t had a form of that.”

She’s proud of GoT: “And that’s because we don’t [talk about] it enough—we shy away from it,” she says. “I think if Game of Thrones came out today, we’d definitely put some trigger warnings on there,” she says. “But I’m really proud to have been a part of Game of Thrones where they didn’t shy away from showing atrocities that happened to women back then. I feel proud to have been part of the conversation.”

[From Flaunt]

My thoughts on GoT and the sexual violence being dramatized… it’s not that they were aiming for realism and it’s not like they were dramatizing actual historical events. These were characters in a science-fiction world with dragons and face-swapping and smoke-assassins. George RR Martin and the show’s writers made the choice to root certain stories in sexual violence and exploitation. I think the critique of “why do we need to dramatize sexual violence in this fictional story” is totally legitimate and, as Sophie says, she respects those critiques and conversations and she’s still proud of the work, as she should be. It wasn’t like she was writing those scenes. If anything, Sansa got the most heroic survivor storyline.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images, cover courtesy of Flaunt.