Give her a complicated mess of a character

'EASY WOMEN ARE BORING,' SAYS SOPHIE TURNER, WHO PLAYS A FINANCE WORKER EMBROILED IN DECEPTION IN NEW THRILLER SERIES 'STEAL' AND WILL HEAD UP THE FORTHCOMING 'TOMB RAIDER'

- BY EMILY ZEMLER

SAMUEL DORE Prime Video

TURNER plays Zara, above, a lowrung employee in a London financial firm forced to take part in a heist in "Steal."

SOPHIE TURNER is interested in playing complicated, potentially messy characters. The British actor is drawn to women who are forced to prove their own worth, although the parallels between them aren't always deliberate. In “Steal,” a six-episode limited series on Prime Video that premiered in full last Wednesday, Turner embodies an undeniably chaotic finance worker named Zara. 9 “Easy women are boring,” she says, speaking from her publicist’s office in London earlier this month. She's days away from kicking off filming on Prime Video's forthcoming “Tomb Raider” series, in which she plays video-game icon Lara Croft. The muscles she’s been building for the past year are hidden under a loose sweater, but Turner, 29, carries herself with a sense of confidence that suggests she’s as strong internally as she is on the outside.

“I want really nuanced, layered characters,” she continues. “I want big character changes. I want to see a progression. To be a character who doesn’t know where she’s going, doesn’t know what she wants to be, feels stuck, feels stalled, feels underappreciated — that’s nice for us to see onscreen. I like seeing women at their rawest and most vulnerable. It’s quite liberating to play.”

When we meet Zara, a low-rung worker at Lochmill Capital in London, she’s hungover and scattered. Her workday takes a turn for the worse when a group of thieves holds up the high-rise office and force Zara and her coworker Luke (Archie Madekwe) to help them steal pension funds. She’s quickly caught up in a complex web of deception, in which she may be complicit.