SANSA STARK: A GIRL HAS A FACE

In acting, brilliant words delivered even more brilliantly (either as a monologue or dialogue) will stir up profound emotions but a facial expression deftly deployed will deliver more eloquence than a thousand words and stir up emotions more profound than an impassioned speech.

With just 2 episodes into the final season of Game of Thrones, Sophie Turner, as Sansa Stark, continues to deliver impressive acting clinic each time she appears on the screen with the most powerful tool any thespian should have in their bag of tricks: emotive facial expressions.

You see it in the opening scene of episode one when she welcomes Daenerys to Winterfell. The cadence of her voice may have betrayed the duplicity of her welcome but the expression on her face spoke even more eloquently.

Progressively in each scene she appears, she deploys her facial expressions to even greater effect.

From the scene where she questions Jon Snow on the motive for his bending the knee to Daenerys to the scene where she expresses her disappointment in Tyrion for believing Cersei’s promise to send troops to fight the White Walkers.

She showed how quickly her sceptic deadpan can give way to a welcoming warmth in the scene where Daenerys wondered rhetorically whom between herself and Jon was being manipulated, and the scene where Brienne of Tarth speaks up for Jaime Lannister.

But nowhere was her mastery of emotive facial expressions put to profound use more than in the scene where, in reacting to Theon Greyjoy requesting to fight for House Stark, she tears up and embraces Theon in a tight hug.

With no words spoken and with just a teary face at seeing an old friend and a warm embrace, she spoke eloquently of the horrors of years past, incredible emotional and physical abuse suffered and of friendship kindled by the fire of a mutually shared past of pain, torture and despondency.

From Season 1 through Season 6, Sansa rightly earned the derision of viewers with the silliness of her character who seemed to favour courting the affections of a reviled juvenile prince turned murderous king over her family’s well-being.

But between Seasons 7 and 8, she has earned the love of viewers with the profundity of the growth in character she has achieved and expressed mostly through the subtle but profound medium of emotive facial expressions.

A girl may have no name but a girl has a face.