WARNING: This Article May Contain Spoilers
I’m going to try not to be overly critical of Sophie Turner when it comes to her role as, let’s be accurate, the young Jean Grey but it was hard for me to look on her taking the role approvingly. Obviously I have grown up with Famke Janssen playing the character who I thought was amazing and I found Turner UNBELIEVABLY annoying in Game of Thrones, however over the years I have come to realize that maybe that was the point because in truth I did always find Sansa Stark rather annoying in the books. Anyway, much like Chris Hemsworth – the three films below are the only ones Sophie had starred in prior to taking on the character.
The Thirteenth Tale
I wondered, in the beginning, about the oddest thing – had they already decided that Vida Winter would have shocking red hair and so chose Sophie Turner to play the younger version or had they dyed Vanessa Redgrave’s hair that colour because they had chosen Turner to play the young Vida. Of course some may look at this film as being a waste in this article as we don’t meet Sophie’s character for such a long time but the film is enjoyable just the same as a true British gothic horror. She appears around 40 minutes from the end of the film when both Emmeline and Adeline are teenagers. She speaks very little at first which is no surprise when you’ve just discovered the body of your uncle…who I believed very quickly was actually their father. With Sophie’s facial expression, I found it completely believable that Vida had killed John the Dig – or should I say Adeline as we believed her to be at the time. This made the outcome of the story that little bit more shocking.
Another Me
This is the only film in this article where Turner actually plays a lead character. Well, I guess technically she plays two lead characters – Fay and Layla. I started wondering in the beginning if the voice we were hearing was Fay speaking to herself or if it was Layla but in the last few sentences the tone changed and it became pretty clear. The idea of this film reminded me a lot of another that I have discussed previously, as Let Her Out has a similar storyline but I feel that with this film Layla’s intentions are sinister from the outset. This film actually proved to me that my issue with Turner, formed from playing Sansa in Game of Thrones is just the fact that she was supposed to be irritating because I found her pretty good in this film. Somehow, her natural accent comes across as extremely sinister when she does the voiceover, especially towards the end of the first segment. What was weird for me is that for someone being haunted, Layla suddenly disappears and all we see is cracking windows and glass. Annoyingly, for a good film the ending was a little predictable but I’m glad that it didn’t have a happy ending.
Barely Lethal
With this film, Sophie returns to the ancillary roleplayingsecond fiddle to another MCU alumni in Hailee Steinfeld. I guess, even though she has a similar number of scenes in this film as in The Thirteenth Tale, Sophie’s role is technically bigger than that in the earlier film.We meet her early, getting her butt kicked by Hailee’s character of, at the time, Agent 83 but following 83 faking her death we don’t see Turner again for a while. I did worry about her potential American accent going into this but for the few lines she has, it actually isn’t too bad but this could be because she only dulled down the posher side to her natural accent. She is reintroduced with around 40 minutes to go as Heather, joining Newton High to supposedly shadow and protect ‘Megan’ before she is pulled out of her new life. I hope for little more psycho in her character when it was revealed about her being a double agent but she seemed to fall rather flat on that part.
