Sophie Turner Says Her Friendship With Maisie Williams Once Had a "Destructive" Side
Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams have become super close playing the Stark sisters on Game of Thrones over the last eight years. So much so that Williams once joked that the whole series was just an elaborate way to bring the two together.
They’re so tight, though, that Turner just revealed on Dr. Phil’s Phil in the Blanks podcast that their friendship had a “quite destructive” side because they didn’t really talk to anyone else on set besides each other.
The comment was part of a larger conversation Turner had with Dr. Phil about how important mental health has become to her. In her late teens, she said she began to experience depression—a result, she thinks, of the fact that she was working on the show and living at home while her friends were off at college. Williams was someone she frequently relied on because they understood each other.
“I have a friend, Maisie, who was on the show with me, she’s just a year younger than me and she and I were growing up together,” Turner told Dr. Phil. “She was my best friend, and she was the only one I really told about all of it.”
However, that the two often shut other people out as their bond grew stronger.
“Maisie and I used to [stay inside] together. I think being friends with each other was quite destructive because we were going through the same thing,” Turner said, adding, “We used to get home from set, go to a Tesco across the road, a little supermarket, and just buy food. We’d go back to our room and eat it in bed. We never socialized for a couple of years. We didn’t socialize with anyone but ourselves.”
Now they seem to have found other ways to spend their time together. In another interview, Turner shared that she and Williams had a very specific way of decompressing from the stress of the hit HBO series. “We just used to sit there and eat and watch stupid videos and smoke weed,” she said during a talk at New York Comic Con. “I don’t know if my publicist will kill me for saying this. We’d get high and then we’d sit in the bath together and we’d rub makeup brushes on our faces. It’s fun.”
All of those experiences seem to have bonded the two actresses for life. Turner has called her connection to Williams “the purest form of true, true friendship,” and it’s not likely that their Stark sisterhood will fade, even after the show comes to its highly anticipated end this year.
As for her own mental health, Turner told Dr. Phil she has prioritized and scheduled time to take time for herself. “I actually am still on my break,” she said. “I took a break off of work to focus on my mental health because I thought it was important.”