The final season of the HBO series premieres on April 14.
Sophie Turner is opening up about pay disparity on Game of Thrones.
The 23-year-old actress covers Harper's Bazaar U.K.'s May issue and reveals why she was OK with her onscreen brother, Kit Harrington, having a bigger paycheck for the eighth and final season of the HBO series.
"[It's] a little tricky," she tells the magazine of demanding equal pay. "Kit got more money than me, but he had a bigger storyline. And for the last [season], he had something crazy like 70 night shoots, and I didn’t have that many. I was like, 'You know what... you keep that money.'"
Despite her own acceptance about making less than Harrington, Turner has made it a point to fight for equality on sets, adding an inclusion rider in her contracts -- demanding 50 percent of the crew be women -- and expressing joy that issues such as these are being discussed.
"Now, you see women in the camera departments, producing, directing. It’s exciting," she says. "... [Executives are] more willing to listen to people saying, 'I want the same amount of money.' So things are getting done, but it will take a while, I think."
While she may not have had over 50 night shoots like Harrington, Turner had to make her own sacrifices to play Sansa Stark, namely not washing her hair for weeks at a time.
"There were moments when I was escaping Winterfell and running through woods and swimming through canals and they were like, 'Don’t wash your hair for the next two weeks.' And it was disgusting," she laments. "From the social aspect, it was revolting. A lot of hats were involved."
Though her hygiene may have suffered due to her role, Turner did gain a new pet thanks to the series when she adopted Zunni, the Northern Inuit dog that played her character's dire wolf.
"Zunni was a terrible actor, really bad on set," she says of the dog, who lived to be 11. "She wouldn’t respond to any of my calls and everyone was ready to fire her, so we took her on when I was 14. She was about three feet tall and pretty big."
Now that Game of Thrones is rapidly approaching its final season, Turner is doing her best to discover "what I like to do for myself."
"It’s been 10 years of playing someone else, and doing what I’m told, and now I’m like 'Hmmm. Maybe I should find some hobbies,'" she says. "I’m passionate about lots of things. I’ll sit in my house in New York and paint. And I’m doing ballet again."
When ET caught up with the actress back in 2016, she revealed that, if Sansa has to die, she'd want it to be quite the spectacle.
"Something that really like drags out over a full episode," she said of her character's possible demise. "The only thing I can think of is poisoning. That's a long one. Or just like a slow stabbing. Just something that will last a long time so I can milk it."
Tune in to ET Monday night for an exclusive interview with Turner. The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones premieres on HBO Sunday, April 14.
RELATED CONTENT:
