Series 8 begins on 14 April with Sansa Stark right in the thick of the action
Game of Thrones is back on our screens in just a couple of weeks and Sophie Turner, who plays Sansa Stark in the fantasy epic, admits she wasn’t too concerned to learn that co-star Kit Harrington earned three times as much as her.
Harrington’s character Jon Snow is one of the most central to the show’s plot as it returns for its final series on 14 April, and given the nature of the filming, Turner admitted it was “a little tricky” to demand equal pay despite growing calls for greater equality among co-stars.
“Kit got more money than me, but he had a bigger storyline,” she told Harper’s Bazaar.
“And for the last series, 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’.”
The shows top earners all take home a reported $500,000 per episode, with those on the highest bracket being Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen), Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister), Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister), and Harrington.
Turner believes that change is afoot, describing seeing more and more women producing and directing films as “exciting”.
“[Executives are] more willing to listen to people saying, ‘I want the same amount of money’,” she added. “So things are getting done, but it will take a while, I think…
“I’ve had moments where I’ve thought in hindsight, ‘That was not an OK thing for someone to do,’ but I’ve never had anything as extreme as these awful Weinstein cases.
“Almost half the people you meet in the industry have some sort of tale to tell. We’d talk about it before, but no one was saying, ‘This is weird, someone should speak up’.
“People had this idea about Hollywood that it’s big and glamorous and crazy things happen and, ‘That’s showbiz, baby’. Until suddenly people started looking at it from a more humane point of view and saying, ‘It’s not OK. It’s abuse’.”
