“Game of Thrones” came to an end in May of 2019 — enraging fans with its lackluster final season — but people are still asking its stars, years later, if they’d consider returning to Westeros somehow. The latest “Game of Thrones” veteran to answer this question? Sophie Turner — who made her industry debut playing Sansa Stark, a shrewd strategist and eldest daughter of the powerful Northern family House Stark.
While speaking to Variety about her newest project “Joan,” interviewer K.J. Yossman brought up the show that made Turner famous, asking, “Could we ever see the return of Sansa Stark?” Turner basically said no, but also admitted she’s curious about how the character would be faring today.
“Maybe,” Turner said. “I mean, it would have to be the exact same cast and the exact same crew otherwise I wouldn’t go back and that would just be season 9, and I don’t think we’re going to do a season 9, but, I mean, I loved playing Sansa, and I do wonder often what would she be doing now. Where would she be five years later, what would she be doing? Would she still be queen in the North? Would she be a good ruler? Would there be some other kind of terrible war that’s happened? I’d love to see it.”
What happens to Sansa Stark at the end of Game of Thrones?
In case you’ve forgotten — or you blocked out the end of “Game of Thrones” entirely, which is understandable — here’s where Sophie Turner’s Sansa Stark ended up as the series concluded. A lot of viewers found Sansa irritating at the beginning of the series, which is also understandable; she was pretty whiny and hyper-fixated on marrying the odious prince Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) during the show’s first season. After watching her father Ned Stark’s (Sean Bean) execution at Joffrey’s hands, though, Sansa changes quite a bit, and audiences soon realize that her real brilliance comes from how she’s able to survive in the shark tank known as King’s Landing. (There are two perfect examples of this in season 2: when she dissuades Joffrey from killing the court jester because it would be bad luck on his name day, and when she quietly negs Joffrey just before the Battle of Blackwater Bay.)
Like the other major characters on “Game of Thrones,” Sansa starts acting in, ahem, extremely questionable ways as the series comes closer to reaching its end (her whole beef with Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen in season 8 seems to be mostly because the mother of dragons is pretty). However, in the series finale, Sansa manages to access some of her long-held intelligence and shrewdness and bargain for an independent North as her brother Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) inexplicably becomes King of the Seven Kingdoms. As Turner mentioned, Sansa becomes Queen in the North, and by all accounts, she probably does a decent job … but the idea that we’d return to Westeros to check in on her reign does feel quite unlikely.
Sophie Turner has stayed busy since Game of Thrones ended
So, what has Sophie Turner been up to since playing Sansa Stark? Well, her new ITV series “Joan” — which is based on the real-life story of a powerful British jewelry thief with a powerful position in England’s criminal underground who balances crime with motherhood — started showing on The CW in the United States this month, for one. (The show will also be available on Britbox on December 5, 2024.) She also had an astoundingly funny turn in the 2022 Netflix original movie “Do Revenge” alongside Maya Hawke and Camila Mendes, and as she told Variety, she recently reunited with her on-screen “sibling” Kit Harington — who played the alleged Stark bastard Jon Snow on “Game of Thrones” — for a new project. “I was doing a TV show that I just wrapped and then I’ve got a new project coming with Kit Harington called ‘The Dreadful,'” Turner revealed. “It’s a somewhat Robert Eggers-esque horror set around the time of the War of the Roses.”
Other than that, Turner has been grappling with her real-life single motherhood, which she also told K.J. Yossman helped inform her performance in “Joan” — she and her husband Joe Jonas split in September 2023 — and she also appeared in the 2022 HBO series “The Staircase,” which brought her back to the premium network that made her famous on “Game of Thrones.” You can catch Turner in “Joan” on The CW and ITV now, and if you want to relive her glory days as Sansa, all of “Game of Thrones” is currently streaming on Max.
