Sophie Turner is rooting for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms to succeed, but she won’t be watching the latest Westeros adventure.
The actress, who played Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones from 2011 to 2019, was recently asked if she plans to watch the latest spinoff series from HBO, which was adapted from a 1998 novella by George R. R. Martin.
“If I’m totally honest, anything Game of Thrones, I don’t think I can [watch],” Turner, 29, told freelance journalist James B. Street on the red carpet for her new Prime Video series Steal. “I can’t even hear the theme tune. It gives me crazy anxiety.”
She’s not sure why that’s her reaction to the theme song, though. As she said, “I don’t know why — I had the best time on that show — but I can’t watch anything related to it.”
Still, Turner shared her hopes for the show’s success. “I’m really excited for the actors on it and I think it’ll probably be incredible, because it is that universe, so good luck to everyone involved,” she said.
“I won’t be watching it, but I’ll be rooting for you.”
Working on Game of Thrones for eight seasons — she auditioned when she was 12 and finished the series when she was 23 — was the “best acting class,” Turner has said.
“I never had proper formal training, so I got to learn from the amazing actors around me, which — I felt like I won a competition,” she said on the Dish podcast in August 2025. “It was great. We all were a family.”
The show, she said, “informed my entire life, in terms of like business decisions, just etiquette on set, how to act … Everything, I learned from Game of Thrones — and a bit from my parents.”
Turner felt particularly connected to Sansa. “My character, I got to live with, so it felt like we kind of merged into one person by the end of it,” she said. “It was amazing.”
For Peter Claffey, who leads the new Game of Thrones series, stepping into the beloved universe was “terrifying” considering what a huge hit the original show was.
“I was a massive original Game of Thrones series fan. I was there for the whole thing, so I understand the reverence that people have for this show,” Claffey, 29, told PEOPLE.
“We tried to do as good of a job, to both the book and the TV fans, for sure, in trying to stick to the characters as much as possible. Hopefully, it will get taken well, but it is daunting,” he said.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms follows the unlikely story of a naive knight, Ser Duncan the Tall (Claffey) and his squire, Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell).
According to HBO, the six-episode series takes place about a century before Game of Thrones begins, and sees Dunk and Egg face “great destinies, powerful foes, and dangerous exploits.”
New episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms air Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO. Turner’s Steal is streaming now on Prime Video.
