Helen Sloan/HBOWarning: major spoilers below! Do not continue reading unless you have seen this week's all-new episode of Game of Thrones, "Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken."
Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) just can't catch a break. After being mentally and physically tortured by Game of Thrones' biggest sociopath Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) before his assassination, the eldest Stark daughter has now been married off to the show's next biggest sociopath, Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon), resulting in one of the worst scenes on the HBO fantasy series to date.
Before their nuptials, Ramsay acted civil enough to Sansa so she didn't understand just how sick and twisted her new husband truly was. Until, that is, their wedding night, when Ramsay brutally raped Sansa while making her childhood friend Theon (Alfie Allen), who betrayed her family, watch the entire thing.
Not only was this rape and marriage a huge deviation from George R. R. Martin's books on which the show is based, but the scene itself was so emotionally scarring that fans everywhere were questioning whether the violent series had gone too far this time. Notable feminist entertainment site The Mary Sue and Democratic U.S. Senator from Missouri Claire McCaskill both publicly spoke out about how this latest scene featuring sexual violence against women took things a step too far, and has caused them to boycott the show both professionally and personally going forward.
But one person who "secretly loved" the Sansa rape storyline? Sansa herself, Sophie Turner!
"I love the fact she's back home reclaiming what's hers [at Winterfell]," Turner tells EW. "But at the same time she's being held prisoner in her own home. When I got the scripts, it was bit like, dude, I felt so bad for her. But I also felt excited because it was so sick, and being reunited with Theon too, and seeing how their relationship plays out. Theon's a member of the Stark clan but she thinks he totally betrayed and killed her brothers. It's a messed-up relationship between them."
And then Ramsay just had to take things to a whole other level, having Theon watch and do nothing while Sansa gets raped. He's even worse than Joffrey ever was!
"When I read that scene, I kinda loved it," Turner says. "I love the way Ramsay had Theon watching. It was all so messed up. It's also so daunting for me to do it. I've been making [producer Bryan Cogman] feel so bad for writing that scene: 'I can't believe you're doing this to me!' But I secretly loved it."
Turner knows that viewers are in shock that the showrunners would do yet another terrible thing to Sansa.
"I completely agree with them!" Turner says. "After Joffrey, she's escaped him and you think she's going to lose her virginity to a guy who's really sweet and takes care of her and she's thrown in with a guy who's a whole lot worse. But I kind of like the fact she doesn't really know what a psycho he is until that night. She has a sense, but she's more scared of his father. And then that night everything gets so f--ked up."
But in terms of the material this horrific act is going to give her from an acting perspective, Turner couldn't be more excited for Sansa's storyline this season.
"I think it's going to be the most challenging season for me so far just because it's so emotional for her," Turner says. "It's not just crying all the time, like seasons two or three, it's super messed up."
Martin wrote about the controversial scene on his Livejournal blog, but mainly just addressed the fact that the show is deviating from his books in major ways this season.
"The show is the show, the books are the books; two different tellings of the same story," Martin says. "There have been differences between the novels and the television show since the first episode of season one. And for just as long, I have been talking about the butterfly effect. Small changes lead to larger changes lead to huge changes. HBO is more than forty hours into the impossible and demanding task of adapting my lengthy (extremely) and complex (exceedingly) novels, with their layers of plots and subplots, their twists and contradictions and unreliable narrators, viewpoint shifts and ambiguities, and a cast of characters in the hundreds."
Read his whole post at his Livejournal now.
Game of Thrones airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.