He portrayed the youthful version of the main character in 2006's The Illusionist, and appeared in Atonement as background gardener Danny Hardman. In 2007, he began a 2 series run as Chris Miles on Skins, where his character was subjected to a number of humiliating circumstances he would've never otherwise been privy to. It was around this time, when he was nineteen, that Stellan became interested in the production side of film making, and he enrolled in both screenwriting and film editing university courses. In 2008, he wrote and directed his first short film. He participated in Tom Ford's A Single Man while completing his courses, and began to focus significantly more on the behind-the-scenes aspect of the entertainment industry, editing Two Gates of Sleep, and writing Simon Killer before he returned to an acting role in 2013, that of Richard (later Richard III) in The White Queen miniseries.
Stellan edited and write two more films (All That I Am (2013) and The Sleepwalker (2014) respectively) and began to prepare for his first larger project, Childhood of a Leader, which he wrote, directed, and produced. It was a massive undertaking and one that pushed Stellan to his professional and personal limits - balancing intense control and creativity proved to be very difficult for him and he found himself retreating socially for the two months it took to film the project.
When Childhood was finished, Stellan signed on to the BBC's War & Peace miniseries as Boris Drubetskoy and began shopping for a distributor for his film, finally finding one in IFC. While creating his own film had been enjoyable, challenging, and rewarding, Stellan was unwilling - or perhaps unable - to immediately return to the notion of beginning a new project, so he returned to acting for the foreseeable future, reuniting with Tom Ford for Nocturnal Animals and providing the voice for Fiver in a BBC/Netflix Watership Down collaboration.
+ Stellan enjoyed a comfortable, average childhood until his mid-teens, when his elder sister Avery launched herself into movie stardom. Having been close until that point, Stellan's obvious course of action was to follow in his sister's footsteps, though they would never achieve the same levels of success. He was a successful student, though marginally less so after his sister became a sex symbol and he became the object of amusement at school. It was not until three years later that Stellan won a role of his own, and still feels as though he's trying to 'catch up' to Avery in the professional sense.
+ Though far from strict, the Turner parents provided steadfast encouragement for their children, which allowed Stellan to grow into a hopeful, if slightly distractible young man. He idolized sister Avery and tended toward the emotionally fraught rather than the physically aggressive. He maintained a close knit core group of friends into adulthood, despite his growing celebrity status.
+ Stellan was a significantly late bloomer, and likes to say he got all the awkward that Avery conveniently skipped. The combination of being reasonably unattractive while having a international covergirl elder sister left Stellan feeling inadequate, and the low esteem would affect him even years after he shot up in height and began looking more like a man and less like a chipmunk.
+ Like anyone who pined after the blessings of a state other than their own, Stellan has begun to realise that while being beautiful certainly helps, it guarantees neither success or happiness, and he's become somewhat disaffected by the superficiality of the world he was so desperate to join.
+ Since the success of his full-length film, Stellan has grown increasingly cocky, leading to an odd combination of being very eager for approval while doubting the importance of it. This brash confidence is rather new for him and helps disguise his actual vulnerabilities, but has the potential to drive away legitimate emotional relationships.