Sophie Turner, who began playing Sansa Stark on HBO’s Game of Thrones aged just 13, has offered some words of warning for the network’s young actors set to star in the upcoming Harry Potter TV series.
Reflecting on her own experience growing up in the spotlight, Turner suggested that today’s child actors likely now have it worse, as social media is even more dominant than when she began acting.
It was only years later that the impact of social media grew to the point where it had a “profound” impact on her mental health, Turner said — something the children cast in the Harry Potter series will have to contend with from the off, and over the coming decade of the series’ production.
“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,” Turner told Flaunt. “It had such a profound impact on my mental health, like more than I could tell you. It almost destroyed me on numerous occasions.
“I look at the kids who are about to be in the new Harry Potter and I just want to give them a hug,” she continued, before sharing the advice she’d give them.
“I’d 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,'” Turner advised. “It’s so important to have that grounding adjacent to the big, crazy stuff that you do.”
More than 32,000 children auditioned for the roles of Harry, Ron and Hermione, before young actors Dominic McLaughlin, Alastair Stout and Arabella Stanton ultimately won the coveted parts. The trio are now set to play the series’ stars for at least seven seasons, each of which will adapt one of the Harry Potter novels.
The mammoth production is now underway, and based at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, near London, where a temporary school has been constructed designed for up to 600 pupils. Cast members attend classes alongside their filming duties, with around 150 children expected to attend daily lessons, and space for up to quadruple this amount at peak periods.
The need to juggle filming with school time was also a consideration for the stars of the previous Harry Potter films — but the creation of a temporary school goes further, and speaks to the size of the TV show’s production. Filming has now begun and will last for around a decade, by which time its young stars will be in their early 20s.
Image credit: Jack Taylor/Getty Images for SXSW London.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
