Glamorous as it looks, an actor's life is far from easy.
Though they're rewarded for their work with cushy homes, luxurious wardrobes, and big
paychecks, performers often make physical sacrifices for their work that many people
would balk at.
Game of Thrones actress Sophie Turner, who plays Sansa Stark on the fantasy drama series,
has revealed that the HBO gig once required her to change her real-life hygiene in a way
she described as "disgusting."
Speaking in an interview with InStyle, Turner spoke about her character's long locks, and
the way they've changed over the years.
At the start of the series, when Sansa was still living a life of privileged royalty,
her hair was kept well-styled and clean.
But as the show progressed, her character's circumstances got much more dire - a shift
which was reflected in Sansa's hairstyle.
It wasn't all just movie magic - to help sell the illusion, Turner was instructed to stop
washing her hair in real life, so that it appeared as dirty, greasy, and grubby as possible
on the show.
It's been reported that the actors on Game of Thrones have had to occasionally quit washing
their hair in order to make their characters look suitably medieval.
According to Turner, those reports are true - and though Sansa's always been pretty far
from the series' battlefields, her character is no exception.
She said,
"For the first few seasons I was allowed to wash my hair because I was an aristocratic
young girl.
Towards season 5 they started asking me to not wash my hair and it was really disgusting.
Now I wear a wig so I can wash my hair whenever I want, which is nice.
But yes, for a couple of years I was living with pretty greasy hair."
All the build-up of grease and grime, Turner said, made her scalp uncomfortable and itchy.
The discomfort was made worse during the series' more wintry scenes, with snow machines sending
tiny bits of white paper through the air to get stuck in her unwashed locks.
She said in the interview,
"We would have the snow machines going so we would have little snow paper particles
that would get stuck in the grease.
It was disgusting."
"It can't be any worse."
"It can.
It can always be worse."
A natural blonde, Turner dyed her hair red to portray Sansa Stark when Game of Thrones
began in 2011.
She kept her hair dyed during the series' production for years, briefly experimenting
with black hair during her arc in the custody of Littlefinger.
It wasn't until 2017 that the series finally allowed her to just wear a wig for the role,
sparing her the trouble of replicating the character's occasionally grimy look.
Part of the reason why Game of Thrones has resonated among so many viewers over the years
has to do with the attention the show pays to detail, and the characters' hairstyles
are all a part of that.
Sansa's looks have never been arbitrary - they reflect what's going on in the character's
life.
According to Turner,
"There's definitely a correlation.
For so long, Sansa's hair changed season by season depending on who was influencing her.
The first few episodes she was a Northerner in Winterfell and took after her mother with
a simple braid down the back.
Then when she went to King's Landing it was a big, decadent halo that was very much like
what the Queen wore.
With Littlefinger, she dyes her hair black and wears all black.
Then she goes back to Winterfell and returns to her mother's hair."
The actress has shared that her favorite Sansa hairstyle came when the character was no longer
being influenced by the people around her, but instead coming into her own.
As she put it in an interview with Refinery29,
"Sansa's hair is constantly reflecting the people she's learning from, or mimicking,
or inspired by at the time.
When she's Cersei's prisoner, and she's kind of absorbing all her manipulative techniques,
it's reflected in her hairstyle, and when she's finding the spirit of Margaery in herself,
she wears her hair like Margaery.
[…] I've always liked when Sansa's hair was dyed black and pulled back in very tight,
taut French braids.
It was her own look, and something that she'd created."
Wig or no wig, the climactic final season of Game of Thrones looks set to be the greasiest
one yet.
In a teaser trailer for final episodes, Sansa, Jon Snow, and Arya Stark can all be seen with
their hair slicked back away from their faces, a somewhat chic look that Turner says comes
down to chronic neglect.
The actress has explained the hairstyles, saying,
"There's been some kind of explosion in Winterfell.
Suddenly, all of our hair just went 'whoop' and stayed there.
The grease really helped.
Actually, it's all just grease.
They haven't washed their hair for so long that they just brush it back with their hands
and it stays."
There's been some gruesome, genuinely stomach-churning stuff on Game of Thrones over the years, from
Joffrey Baratheon's death by poison to The Mountain smashing Oberyn Martell's skull.
But all that stuff is special effects and make-believe - the realistic, really gross
hair from a world before modern hygiene?
That's something that actually follows the actors home.
"They find us repulsive."
"I find us repulsive."
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