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 when she promised to send troops
to join in the impending battle with the Nightwalkers.
She showed how quickly her sceptic deadpan can give way to a welcoming
warmth in the scene where Daenerys wondered rhetorically whom between her
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
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 dsepondency.
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.