{"id":309282,"date":"2026-02-21T05:29:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T05:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/309282\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T05:29:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T05:29:07","slug":"sophie-turner-and-kit-haringtons-forbidden-romance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/309282\/","title":{"rendered":"Sophie Turner and Kit Harington’s Forbidden Romance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tNatasha Kermani\u2019s film began with a dark vision she couldn\u2019t shake.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI couldn\u2019t let go of this idea of two women living in a very desolate, barbaric landscape,\u201d she says. \u201cI felt like that was a relationship I didn\u2019t see a lot, and one I wanted to explore. We see a lot of mothers and daughters, but we don\u2019t see a lot of mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, two women of two different generations who have been thrust into coexistence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom there, the idea of \u201cThe Dreadful<\/a>\u201d was born. The film, headed to theaters today via Lionsgate, is a dramatic horror tale set during the War of the Roses, at the tail end of the Dark Ages. Sophie Turner<\/a> stars as Anne, who is living with her mother-in-law, Morwen (a fiery Marcia Gay Harden), while her husband is at war. But when her childhood friend (Kit Harington<\/a>) tells her that her husband has died, they grow closer and evil starts lurking.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile Kermani, who wrote and directed the film, is upfront about her love of genre films, she says she is always careful to make sure the scares work in service of the characters.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI don\u2019t think anything I do is a horror conceit first,\u201d she says. \u201cEverything I do is based on relationship and a character\u2019s journey from Point A to Point B. The horror needs to express that journey. The horror needs to be a color in our palette that we\u2019re using to tell this character\u2019s story. Often these characters are experiencing fear, so it\u2019s always the question of, \u2018What is this character afraid of?’\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSophie Turner and Natasha Kermani on the set of \u201cThe Dreadful.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tKate Eccarius<\/p>\n

\n\tBeyond traditional scares, \u201cThe Dreadful\u201d amps up the eerie atmosphere and discomfort. One meta element comes from the casting of Turner and Harington as lovers, which feels a bit wrong given that their \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d characters are raised as siblings. Even Turner admitted<\/a> it felt odd. But Kermani says it\u2019s a happy accident that audiences are coming in with that subtext.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThese characters were always childhood friends,\u201d she says. \u201cOne of the themes of the film is growing up, so she has these memories of this character as a child and their childhood together. Now here they are as adults, reevaluating their relationship. They\u2019re not related in our film, but there is a bit of a love triangle, so there is a forbidden fruit feeling in our film. I think it\u2019s interesting that it worked out that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tKermani went on to praise Turner\u2019s performance as uniquely intuitive, able to draw even more from her character beyond the script.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOne of the things she latched onto was the character\u2019s spirituality and inner strength,\u201d she says. \u201cI think that was something I didn\u2019t necessarily see up front. I thought maybe this character would feel more childlike, a bit of a blank slate that evolves. But what Sophie brought that I loved so much, and I\u2019m so glad she did, is that you can actually see that strength and steeliness in her from the first time she appears onscreen. She has these instincts and intuition for the characters that she is able to string through in a very consistent way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Dreadful\u201d is a melting pot of influences, including a reimagining of the folk tale that inspired the classic Japanese horror film \u201cOnibaba.\u201d Yet even as the stakes rise and the scares come along, Kermani says it\u2019s a small-scale story at heart.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat core relationship between the two women, specifically the older generation and a younger generation, and the struggle between them as it starts to fray and to fall apart, and the one character is trying to move away, and the other one is trying to hold onto her, felt to me like an interesting sandbox to play in,\u201d she says. \u201cEverything else \u2014\u00a0the mythology, the fantastical elements, the period \u2014\u00a0really came out of exploring that core relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWatch the trailer for \u201cThe Dreadful\u201d below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Natasha Kermani\u2019s film began with a dark vision she couldn\u2019t shake. \u201cI couldn\u2019t let go of this idea…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309283,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,83725,270,65161,124062],"class_list":{"0":"post-309282","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-kit-harington","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-sophie-turner","14":"tag-the-dreadful"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}