Perched on a tiny wooded island that’s humming with African rainforest birds, Gorilla Kingdom is easily one of the main attractions at London Zoo. On this unseasonably mild Tuesday morning in late February, it’s a hive of activity for good reason: the troop of western lowland primates who live here have two adorable newborns in its midst. “Look, there she is, with her little one!” says Sophie Turner pointing towards Effie, the proud mama who’s swinging from monkey bars with her yet-to-be-named two-week-old.
The actor had initially proposed a walk on Primrose Hill, but happily obliged when I suggested a detour to the nearby zoo – because who could possibly resist the allure of baby gorillas? As a mother of two young children, Turner, 28, is familiar with the terrain. When she lived in New York, she would often take her daughters, Willa, who is almost four, and Delphine, who turns two in July, to Central Park Zoo. This morning she’s come from drop-off at Willa’s new nursery school in west London and arrives wrapped up in an oversized camel-coloured Maison Margiela coat that has cool mum written all over it. “It’s actually the one coat I brought with me from America,” says Turner, who moved from Miami back to the UK last year. “If you can believe it, I only packed one suitcase.”
Fresh-faced and twinkly eyed, her long blonde hair tucked casually into her collar, Turner could easily be mistaken for a very stylish Swedish au pair on her gap year. “‘Effie is our most playful and cheeky female, she was born in 1993 at Copenhagen Zoo, and is well-known in the Zoo for her huge appetite,’” she says, reading the gorilla’s bio aloud, the thespian notes of her voice dialled up for dramatic effect. This attracts the attention of a nerdy but charming zookeeper, who proceeds to share the particulars of Effie’s birthing story in minute detail: as it turns out, this baby, Effie’s fourth, was born wrapped in its umbilical cord and is lucky to be feeding normally. “Do you see how she’s dangling her baby by one arm? That’s actually not the best way to handle their newborns,” says the zookeeper, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “They’re supposed to be wrapped around the body.” As he speaks, a crowd has begun to gather and Effie and her idiosyncratic parenting skills are beginning to cause some disdain. “So you mean to say she’s a mother of four and she still hasn’t learnt how to carry her baby correctly?” asks a voice in a mock accusatory tone. The actor turns to me, eyebrows raised. She’s clearly thinking what I’m thinking: how depressing that mum-shaming is a thing, even for animals!
Lightweight wool jacket and trousers, Victoria Beckham
Responsible wool tuxedo jacket and trousers, Stella McCartney
Turner is no stranger to her own brand of casual misogyny. In the last six months, she’s been subject to mum-shaming of the most egregious kind. Following news last September that her husband, Joe Jonas, had filed for divorce after four years of marriage, and the release of a joint statement on Instagram in which the couple announced they had “mutually decided to amicably end our marriage”, the narrative surrounding their break-up took a predictably toxic turn. Rumours that she’d been somehow shirking her maternal responsibilities proliferated in the tabloids and on gossip websites. It wasn’t too hard to read between the lines: “She likes to party, he likes to stay at home. They have different lifestyles,” a source told TMZ. The insidious bad-mother trope, old as time, spread wide when images of Turner at a wrap party in Birmingham for Joan – the six-part ITV drama inspired by the true story of Joan Hannington, Britain’s most notorious jewel thief – began to circulate. “Sophie Turner Partied ‘Without a Care in the World,’” read one retrograde headline. Meanwhile, her pop idol husband was portrayed as the doting dad, captured dutifully tending to his two daughters by the paparazzi.
“I mean, those were the worst few days of my life,” says Turner, drawing a sharp intake of breath, the memory clearly still fresh enough to strike like a gut punch. We’ve moved from the frenzy of the Gorilla Kingdom to a quiet corner in the zoo’s canteen, a vast light-filled space that’s crammed with long white tables and, mercifully, virtually empty now that the breakfast rush is over. “I remember I was on set, I was contracted to be on set for another two weeks, so I couldn’t leave. My kids were in the States and I couldn’t get to them because I had to finish Joan. And all these articles started coming out…” she says, pausing to sip on a strawberry smoothie. “It hurt because I really do completely torture myself over every move I make as a mother – mum guilt is so real! I just kept having to say to myself, ‘None of this is true. You are a good mum and you’ve never been a partier.’”
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At first, to the outside world at least, the couple had shared a united front, posting their joint statement the day after Jonas had filed legal papers in Miami. There are elements about the breakdown of her marriage she cannot discuss for legal reasons, such as whether news of the divorce was unexpected or that, as Jonas’s side has suggested, she was “aware” he was going to file. Much like everyone else, she has claimed she got wind of it all via the media. Then the “wayward mother” stories began. “I mean, it’s unfathomable the amount of people that will just make sh*t up and put it up based on a picture. A picture might tell a thousand words, but it’s not my story. It felt like I was watching a movie of my life that I hadn’t written, hadn’t produced, or starred in. It was shocking. I’m still in shock.”
