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Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner says she “leaned into” playing a corporate worker who is at “rock bottom” in new Amazon Prime Video heist drama Steal.
“I think there’s a liberation that comes with being at the lowest of the low and it makes you do some crazy things – I could definitely lean into it!” she says of her latest role.
Turner has had a difficult couple of years, navigating divorce from singer Joe Jonas and resolving a legal dispute over the custody of their two children.
The 29-year-old plays pension investment company employee Zara, who, alongside best friend Luke (Archie Madekwe), is forced to carry out the demands of a violent gang that bursts into their offices.
Before the heist takes place, Turner tells the BBC the only thing left for her character “to do is party and throw caution to the wind” because her life feels dull and directionless.
The actress, who is also set to star as Lara Croft in a new Tomb Raider series, is perhaps more familiar to fans dressed in the ancient robes she donned when playing Sansa Stark.
It was a different story for this show, with Turner telling me that she got the full experience of “sweating in a suit” whilst filming in a set designed to replicate a City of London office building.
The cast were on set “for six weeks straight”.
“By the end of it, I really felt like I’d worked an office job and climbed the corporate ladder,” Turner says.
Saltburn actor Madekwe adds that they were “going in every single day [to the office set] in the boiling hot of the summer”.
“We were coming back to our desks and there was no natural daylight – we were exhausted by the end of it”.
The novelty of office life wasn’t lost on their co-star, Wolf Hall and The Queen’s Gambit actor Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, who explains that because he’s “done a lot of period stuff”, it was “really nice and weird putting on a suit and tie everyday”.
Fortune-Lloyd, who plays a detective with gambling addiction issues in the show, added that he “quite liked” the office environment.
“It felt like I was living another life, one that my parents led in a way.”
The series, which is produced by Drama Republic, the indy behind series such as Riot Women and One Day, raises a number of questions about fairness of pay in the financial industries and the opportunities, or lack of, available to those in their 20s and 30s.
Despite the show’s heist element, Madekwe says it has “such a relatable story of feeling trapped in a rat race”.
“The cost of living crisis has changed the way we live so much, the way we spend and how far our money goes,” he adds.
The 30-year-old actor says he knows what it’s like “to be in the midst of a [financial] crisis” and that “everybody feels it to some degree”.
