Turning Point

The hectic recent years she’s referring to have included seeing her personal life being picked apart across the tabloids – her marriage to popstar Joe Jonas, welcoming two daughters together (Willa, five, and Delphine, three), and their divorce and cross-Atlantic custody battle. The scrutiny has lessened since she moved back to the UK with the girls last year, she thinks. And despite Turner’s justified cynicism about the media, she seems relaxed, sanguine and not overly guarded in an interview setting. But fame is still, decidedly, a “very weird state to live in, because nothing’s sacred,” she says. “There’s no room for mistakes. You have to know that everything you do could come out at some point.”

Speculation about her life – dating rumors in particular – remains rife. “It’s a total fishbowl. And people take so much as fact these days. Any article that comes out, people go, ‘Right, that must have happened.’” Given her natural candor, one of the biggest struggles is not being able to respond and refute. “You feel like you’re gagged because silence is always the way to let something die out. But it means that you can’t stand up for yourself ever, so there’s a feeling of helplessness and shame.”

At least with her loved ones she can set the record straight, but there’s still a powerlessness over what she gets to share and when. “I get calls from my mum going, ‘Oh my God, darling, I didn’t know this happened.’ And I’m like, ‘It might have happened, but I wasn’t ready to tell you, let alone the world…’ You just don’t have the narrative over your own story.”

Where Turner is relishing the opportunity to take more control these days is over her career – from the projects she takes on to the conviction she brings to set. “Whenever I do a job, it’s not like I want to prove [something] to the world. I don’t do it for anyone else. [My work] is strictly for me,” she says, when I ask about influences over her decision-making. Having done so much growing up in the industry, she also feels “more ownership” over her roles now.

“I didn’t feel like I necessarily had the right to that when I first started. That was something I put in my own head, like, you’re just a cog in this wheel, do what you can to do a good job and make everyone happy. And now, as I’ve gotten older, my characters are like my children. I have to do right by them, no matter what. I feel more power in terms of that.”

Her latest venture is the heart-pounding Steal, in which she plays very ordinary city worker Zara, who finds herself at the center of an ultra-high-stakes heist. “It’s intense, isn’t it?!” she laughs. The hook that drew her in was the question that director Sam Miller wanted the action to pivot around: “What makes good people do bad things?”

“I thought, that’s a fucking great theme. It is really an exploration of the human psyche and what our brains are capable of under pressure.” It isn’t just the twists and turns of the plot that keep the audience guessing, but Turner’s deft depiction of a person who is both fallible and inscrutable. Is that something that attracts her to a role?

“Subconsciously, yeah,” she replies. “I mean, I think I look at myself the same way. Like, am I a morally dubious character? But it’s just the breadth of the human experience. And I don’t enjoy seeing one-note characters on screen.”

Turner can’t say much yet about her hugely anticipated outing as Lara Croft in Prime Video’s new blockbuster Tomb Raider series, created and written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, as it’s still in the early stages of production, but her excitement about it is palpable. “God, I was over the moon,” she says of landing the part. “It’s very different to the roles that I usually play. I’m not normally seen as an action girl or strong in who she is as a person. I often play characters that are constantly questioning themselves. It’s refreshing to do something different.”

She’s currently in the midst of grueling prep to play the fictional action-adventurer, undertaking daily personal training sessions and honing a variety of high-intensity disciplines, speaking of a determination to zone in on roles that “stretch me more and more”.

Nothing is totally off the table in terms of projects she’ll consider, but “for a long time after Game of Thrones, I said, ‘No medieval projects, no period pieces.’ And then I shot The Dreadful last year, and I remembered why I didn’t enjoy doing them,” she quips. “You’re outside a lot, you’re in dresses that are too cold, and you get mud everywhere.”

But it wasn’t only the mud that she was keen to shake off after the decade she spent on Game of Thrones. “I think I had a bit of an identity crisis and needed to step away entirely from that world for a couple of years,” she continues. “It was like a death, that show finishing. We all had to go away and process it a bit. I needed time to figure out who I was, what I wanted, who I was as an actor.” Working on Gothic horror The Dreadful did mean a happy reunion with her Game of Thrones co-star Kit Harrington, this time playing lovers rather than siblings. “We have this unspoken dialogue. I can read him and he can read me. It grounded me, having him on set. It brought me back to being a 13-year-old who didn’t know anything about the industry.”

If there is one silver lining to take away from the pain of the past few years, it’s the belief Turner has built in her own resilience. “As stressed as I am, I know I can get through it. That’s the good thing about having a relatively hard twenties: I learned that I can survive a lot,” she reflects. “I’m like, there’s pressure, there’s stress, but I’ve been through worse. I have to remind myself that we’re very malleable and we can take on a lot more than we think we can.”

A great therapist and a close-knit group of girlfriends are the tonics that support her through the most difficult times. “I bury myself in the stuff that actually matters,” says Turner, who has spoken openly in the past about her struggles with mental health and an eating disorder, of her coping mechanisms. “I don’t read the internet, I don’t look myself up, otherwise that would absolutely kill me. When everything comes out in the press and it feels like it’s so big, it’s like, let me go and focus on somebody else’s life for a bit. Being around people I love and realizing that, if it’s not in their realm, then it doesn’t fucking matter.”

She’s thankfully able to see now the absurdity of untrue narratives touted by the press about her life – including the misogynistic reporting of her parenting in the wake of her divorce – but it doesn’t mean she’s not still holding herself to impossibly high standards. “The mum guilt is there forever,” she tells me, apologetically, eyeing my baby bump. “I work all week and then, on the weekends, I’ll spend all day with my kids each day. But if I go out for lunch with a friend, I will run back home because my heart is sinking that I’ve left them.”

The balance between different parts of her life is virtually nonexistent at the moment, and she admits there are areas that often get sacrificed. “I mean, I haven’t seen my friends or gone on a date in weeks, months!” she exclaims. “I just sack off parts of my life sometimes. I only have the capacity for work and family right now. But I’m working on it. I’ll get there.”

And while the guilt is real, it’s important to her that her daughters get to see her doing something for herself. “In order to be a great role model for them, I have to have a passion for myself. I love that they see me going out to work every day and working my arse off.” She is vehement about not wanting them to follow her career path (“I’m really hoping they’re academics!”), but credits them with reigniting her passion for acting. “They love making up plays. I’ve got the joy and the childlikeness of it back, which is so nice. [Although] they still want to play Disney princesses, where the prince comes and kisses them on the cheek. And I’m like, ‘No, YOU can save the prince!’”

As for what motherhood has taught her about herself, “my capability to beat a bitch up if they come near my child,” she insists with a smile. Beyond her protective instincts, helping her children learn to navigate their feelings has proven equally valuable. “If you have these overwhelming emotions, how do you get it out? That’s something I’ve never really been able to figure out how to do for myself. So, I’m teaching my kids and we’re trying different things, and then it’s like they’re teaching me how to self-soothe or to process an emotion.”

At the start of a new year, Turner’s not really into resolutions and has her sights set on her longer-term goals for the decade she’ll soon be stepping into. “I’m looking forward to knowing myself better, knowing my boundaries and [having] a little more autonomy over my own life.” After years of surviving other people’s narratives about her, it’s about time she gets to share her own.

Steal is on Prime Video from January 21

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