Sophie Turner remembers the moment she realized the end was coming. The Game of Thrones star, 21, opened up to The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published on Tuesday, December 12, about the emotional final script read for the HBO series with longtime cast mates including Kit Harington and Maisie Williams.
“The day where we had the final read-through for the final script, it was really bittersweet. It was hard,” Turner recalled. “At the end of the very last script, they read aloud, ‘End of Game of Thrones.’ As soon as they read that out, pretty much everyone burst into tears. There was a standing ovation for [showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss]. We were all clapping and cheering. It was amazing. It was the first time every single castmember had been there and sat through all of the scripts for season 8.”
Although she knew she was sitting down to read the script for the last time, Turner, who plays Sansa Stark, was still caught off guard at the realization that the series on which she has appeared since 2011 was going to wrap. “It was a shock to the system. We actually realized, reading that ‘end of Game of Thrones’ line, that that was it,” she explained. “When you’re in it, you don’t really see an end point. It’s just an ongoing thing you’re living with. It was a real shock. It was really sad, but there was an immense amount of pride, too. We realized we had done it. We had created this amazing thing, and that’s it now. It was just a feeling of pride.”
“I was proud of David and Dan, and I was looking around at all of the other cast members around the table, nodding at them, and saying: ‘Well done. We’ve done it.’ It was the craziest feeling,” she continued. “It’s the biggest project we’ll ever do. We’ve put our hearts and souls into it. Saying goodbye to it means putting parts of our hearts and souls behind. But we also know we’ve given it everything that we’ve got.”
Still, the star, who is currently engaged to Joe Jonas, couldn’t help but wonder about her daily life when the HBO series comes to an end, a musing which ultimately brought the cast members closer. “The anxiety of, ‘What the f–k are we going to do when this whole thing finishes?’” she joked. “Panic started there. Probably since season five I started personally feeling like it was all winding down. All of the sudden, we started hanging out a lot more often and realizing we shouldn’t really take this for granted. We’re having more dinner parties and making the most of it more now.”
Game of Thrones’ final season will air on HBO in 2019.
