The actress on what she’s learned from her role on HBO Max’s The Staircase.
Sophie Turner has always loved the true-crime genre. “I find myself completely drawn to it and utterly fascinated by it. I don’t know why it’s become such a thing, but I love it,” the actress shares with a soft chuckle. “I’m invested, I’m in it. Keep them coming!”
Turner, who grew up before millions of viewers as the tragic heroine Sansa Stark on the smash-hit series Game of Thrones, has returned home to HBO in The Staircase—a dramatized account of the Michael Peterson trial. Peterson, an American novelist, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his second wife, Kathleen Peterson, who was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs. In a twist even stranger than fiction, it was revealed that Elizabeth Ratliff, a friend of the Peterson family, died from a similar fall down the stairs in 1985 in Germany.
Turner plays Margaret Ratliff, who Michael adopted after the death of her mother and father. She relished the first-time challenge of playing a nonfictional character. “That was a whole different kind of ball game for me. We were very, very, very lucky to be able to have our director in touch with quite a few members of people who were involved in the case, Margaret being one of them. She was kind of a point of information to do with the family, for (executive producer) Antonio Campos and for all of us.”
Though the real Margaret added nuance and context to her onscreen depiction, Turner had no personal contact with her. “She just wanted to keep it to herself and Antonio, and didn’t want to quite have those sit-down, in-depth discussions with me, which I completely understand and respect. I think this is, like, one of the most traumatic times in her life, and I was not going to push.”
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