The 24-year-old, most famous for playing troubled Stacey Slater in EastEnders, portrays a young nail technician who signs up as a soldier in the Royal Army Medical Corps in new one-off BBC drama Our Girl.
“I spent quite a lot of time at [Army Training Centre] Pirbright and I said to one of the corporals, ‘I’m quite fit, I exercise every day’,” Turner explains.
“She said, ‘There’s civilian fit and Army fit’, and I thought, ‘OK... I need to get on the weights!’”
The actress, a petite 5ft 3in, admits the extra work-outs came in handy.
“I tried to do everything as real as possible, so the weight [of the pack] was as it would be for a young girl joining the army,” she says. “It’s amazing that there’s no difference between the men and the ladies, it’s the same for both.
“At some points you’re carrying about six stone on your back and when you’re only eight stone, it’s like, ‘Oh dear, how am I going to do this?’”
Over the course of filming, Turner saw her body transform. “I finished with lots of muscles that I’d never had in my life, don’t really know what to do with them. I had a really muscly back and arms.”
Our Girl tells the inspirational story of Molly Dawes, who has left school with no qualifications and has a part-time job in a local nail bar. Her family is struggling financially, and Molly’s prospects don’t look great.
Finding out her boyfriend has been cheating on her is a harsh blow, and she ends up, on her 18th birthday, getting drunk and throwing up in the doorway of the Army Recruitment Office.
On a whim, Molly signs up for a test to join the Army and, when she passes, is sent to an Army training camp where she discovers a new purpose to life.
Turner explains: “She’s lived in East Ham her whole life, she’s never really left it, never been away, but she wants better for herself and sees an opportunity, thinking she’s going to fail, but she goes on to become a really good soldier.”
When researching for the role, Turner spoke to real-life young female soldiers at Pirbright in Surrey.
“I was very lucky to speak to girls who were my age and my build and going through it,” she says. “I followed them through their 14 weeks’ training and found out why they’d joined and whether they’d ever wanted to leave.
“A lot of the girls had thought they were going to end up in a rubbish job, like Molly, who looked at her mum and thought, ‘I don’t want to do that’.
“A couple said they just couldn’t get a job and that really stayed with me because I thought - that’s not really a big enough reason to risk your life, but if that’s what you want to do...”
For the weapons training, there were “hours spent marching round car parks” while she was scrutinised for accuracy by a corporal who joined the cast and crew 24/7.
“If my thumb was out of place, then he would say, ‘You have to do that one again’, and if there was one tiny little thing I’d done wrong, he was watching.
“We just wanted to get it as real as possible because the Army hate it so much when they watch army programmes and it’s nothing like the real thing. But they understand it’s telly.”
While Turner came away from the experience with a new appreciation of how the armed forces can help young people from different backgrounds, she wasn’t tempted to jack in her acting career for a life of service.
“It’s really tough - you’ve got to be a certain type of person and I’m a wimp, so I’d be no good,” she admits.
Although it’s now three years since she left EastEnders, London-born Turner is still best known for playing Stacey Slater, a role for which she won best actress four times at the British Soap Awards.
But, she reveals today, she never actually wanted to be an actress.
“It was more like a hobby that sort of turned into a job,” she says laughing, before adding that she’s stuck with her career choice now: “I don’t have any qualifications to do anything else!”
As her childhood home backed onto one of the EastEnders sets at Elstree Studios, it almost seems inevitable she’d end up in Albert Square. She made her first appearance in 2004, after she’d left school at the age of 16.
“I learned everything I know from there, so I’ve got a lot to thank them for and I loved that job. But I was curious as to what else was out there and what more I could achieve,” she says.
“Once I’m done with that, then you never know...”
It’s a tantalising hint that Stacey may return to the iconic soap, but Turner is not missing the hours.
“I still speak to Jake Wood and Charlie Clements, but it’s so hard to meet up because they work six days a week, 14 hours a day. It’s quite nice [for me] now, I don’t know how I ever fitted anything in!
“It’s nice having the freedom to do other things, even normal things like going to the doctor and the dentist, they were hard to do when you worked there. I do get bored, I like to keep working,” she adds.
Next on her wish list is a period drama - for the costumes - and a spot of theatre: “I’d just like to do more good work and discover more of the industry. I’m ticking off my list as I go!”
