Sophie Turner says American politics made it too hard to cope with living in the US

Sophie Turner said she felt homesick while living in the US.

Sophie Turner said she struggled with American politics when she was married to Joe Jonas and living in the US.

In an interview with Harpers Bazaar published on Wednesday, the British actor opened up about the years she spent in the US. After marrying Jonas, Turner moved to LA in 2019, and they relocated to Miami in 2021. She said she felt homesick wherever they went. “Every city we ended up in, the first thing I’d do was find a British shop and stock up on a month’s worth of chocolate,” she told Harpers Bazaar.

Still, Turner, 28, found it most difficult to cope with America’s politics. “The gun violence, Roe v. Wade being overturned… Everything just kind of piled on,” she said.

After the school shooting in Uvalde in 2022, where a teenage gunman fatally shot 19 children and two teachers, Turner said she “knew it was time to get the fuck out of there.”

In May, she said in an interview with British Vogue that at the time, she felt like a “little bird trapped in a gilded cage” living in the US.

“I couldn’t fathom being a mother of one of those children knowing that this was something your country could fix, that they’d rather have rights to guns than give kids a right to life,” she said.

“Meanwhile, women in the US are being stripped of their rights, left, right and center. It all contributed to this feeling of I have to get out, I have to get out.”

The “Game of Thrones” actor and Jonas announced their plan to divorce last year. They share two daughters, Willa, 4, and Delphine, 2.

Turner, who now lives in West London, told Harpers Bazaar she’s “so happy to be back.”

“It felt as if my life was on pause until I returned to England,” she said.

A representative for Turner didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from B-17 sent outside regular business hours.

When politics becomes a reason to leave

Politics is also weighing heavily on many Americans; the Pew Research Center surveyed 8,480 US adults in July 2023 and found that nearly two-thirds of Americans say they always or often feel “exhausted” when thinking about politics.

In March, B-17 reported that the political outlook amid the upcoming election has also prompted some to consider leaving the country.

Fears over gun violence have pushed others to look elsewhere.

In September, Genie Doi, an attorney, told B-17 that a shooting near her son’s day care had prompted her to relocate her family from California to Japan in 2022.

“Since we moved, over the past almost two years, gun violence in the US has continued. It just keeps happening,” she said. “So I’m grateful that I could get my children out of that environment.”

Similarly, Chris Ouellet, who lived in Chicago, previously told B-17 that one reason he moved to British Columbia in 2020 with his partner was to escape gun violence.

“When you’re out in public and you hear a noise, no one runs, no one checks over their shoulder, and no one thinks that it could be gun violence,” he said.