Sophie Turner says playing ex-thief Joan Hannington was the 'thrill of her career'

Sophie Turner may be known for her star-turning role as Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones, but playing former criminal Joan Hannington in ITV's true crime drama about her life proved to be the biggest "thrill of [her] career".

The actor spoke of her admiration for her real-life counterpart at a press conference for the new drama, saying that she found the ex-thief to be a "magnetic woman" in person. ITV's new series is inspired by Hannington's memoir I Am What I Am, and recounts how she became the UK's most notorious jewel thief in the 1980s alongside her quest to reunite with her daughter who she was forced to put into foster care.

"It was amazing, it was the thrill of my career," Turner said at the event. "To be able to play someone like Joan, who's so multifaceted and is so funny, but [has] gone through so much trauma — she's so ambitious, and she's all these things, 'mother, lover, liar, thief' but there really is so much to her.

"She really is so much in one person, and I just felt it would be the biggest treat to be able to play her, and it's just remarkable that it's all a true story... inspired by."

The series was created by Anna Symon, who reunites with her Mrs Wilson collaborators director Richard Laxton and producer Ruth Kenley-Letts. For Symon, it was Hannington's memoir that she instantly connected with Hannington: "I was captivated by the character of Joan, she's such a complex and extraordinary woman, both vulnerable and strong. She makes some terrible choices, unfortunately, but I think [is] someone that a lot of people can relate to, and I just wanted to read more and more about her.

"There was a line very early on in the book where she says 'diamonds were my life, my buzz, my art', and I just thought, 'Who is this woman? Why haven't I heard her story Why hasn't her story been told on television?' and all that just really made me want to write it."

Hannington was closely involved in the making of the series, and Turner found meeting her to be incredibly informative: "We actually didn't meet until really quite close to filming started. I kind of had an idea of what I was doing with the character, I pretty much had it because there's so much in Joan's book and it's so written in her own voice. I kind of soaked that up, I read it about 9-10 times, so really the last piece of the puzzle was meeting Joan.

"The minute Joan walks into a room she is the the star of that room, she's the diamond. It was her mannerisms that I hadn't quite got, and it was just the essence of her that I was missing.

"And when I finally met her I saw this magnetic woman and I really, truly understood why Boisie [Hannington's husband, played by Frank Dillane in the series], why so many people, were drawn to her the way she was drawn to her jewels."

Symon had a similar experience when she first met the show's subject. "We met in a cafe in North London," she explained. "I was quite nervous, having read her book and hearing about some of the crimes that she'd done and, obviously, wanting her approval, wanting to talk to her about how I'd done it.

"So that was the first stage, the research, talking to Joan a lot — luckily, she approved of my ideas. The first thing she said was 'I don't want you to do this unless you're going to tell the warts and all'. By which she meant that she wanted her childhood included in it, which we come on to later in the series, because I think she wanted people to know this behaviour came from somewhere.

"I would have done that anyway, because I wanted to tell the true story of Joan, I wanted to tell the truth of her character. The truth of the unbelievable complexity within her character, but I also wanted the latitude to move away from the chronology of everything she'd done, so we decided that the best way to do that would to just use the book as an inspiration."

Some aspects of Hannington's story has been changed for the show, her six siblings have been amalgamated into one character —a sister named Nancy, played by Kirsty J. Curtis— for example. But one of the things that was most important to get across in the series was her fight to reunite with her daughter Kelly.

Turner explained: "She's the crux of everything in this story, and while we would be filming scenes that weren't involving Kelly Richard would always come up to me, almost every scene, and go 'and where's Kelly?' And so it was always a constant reminder of this is why she's doing it.

"Because I think sometimes when you're doing a a show like this and it's history, and there's diamonds, and glamour, you get kind of swept away by it by it all and you have to remember that this is to provide a solid and stable life for her daughter so she can get her back. It's really a heartbreaking story, and so we had to constantly be reminding ourselves of that to keep it grounded and to not get too excited."

She added she found it easy to channel the emotional weight required for scenes about Hannington's struggle to regain custody of her daughter, because of her own children: "I'm a mother, so anything to do with children it just kind of flows out."

Another key part of the narrative is the love story between Hannington and Boisie, her future husband, who is portrayed by Renegade Nell's Frank Dillane. The actor, like Turner, was keen to do right by his portrayal of Boisie in the series.

"I got to know, Joan, we talk a lot. I was constantly running things past her and it was just an endless wealth of information and love, she's a great friend," the actor said.

The show also required a strong bond between Dillane and Turner, which the latter said they worked well together because they got on so quickly: "Luckily we like each other, we became really close, actually, during this. It was imperative that we had a good relationship, and I think I kind of artistically fell in love with Frank a little bit because the way he works is so fascinating.

"He dives so deep into his characters, and just to watch him on set was really fascinating for me because I think we work in different ways. But, I really found myself relying on him for a lot of it, the emotional stuff, and we became quite close too."

"Sophie is so easy to love," Dillane concurred. "And I really found it just such a pleasure, I feel the same."

Hannington, for her part, was delighted with the work that Turner did in the role, saying: "To be sitting here at 68 with my son and my granddaughter, talking about me, I still find it a bit... I'm not a showbiz person, I'm a very private person and I just find it amazing."

Joan premieres on ITV1 and ITVX on Sunday, 29 September at 9pm.

This article originally appeared on Yahoo TV UK at https://uk.news.yahoo.com/sophie-turner-joan-hannington-itv-edited-170056553.html