“I’m profoundly aware of the fact that there will be people who love Game of Thrones and are seeing it for that,” she tells the BBC.
“It’s 10 times more frightening because there’ll be people wanting to go and say, ‘Well she can only act on camera, she clearly can’t act on stage,’ which is obviously the biggest fear.”
But the British actress also hopes that by appearing in a play written in 1895, about a group of lonely Russians living on an isolated country estate, she will encourage a different audience to go to the theatre.
“Hopefully they’ll come and go, ‘We just came to see the Mother of Dragons, oh how frustrating, she’s not on a dragon, this isn’t what I paid for.’ Spoiler: I’m not on a dragon at any point during this play,” she laughs.
“But hopefully what they get, as a kind of little extra, is that they get to enjoy this play that they might not have seen otherwise.”
Clarke plays Nina opposite co-star Tom Rhys Harries, who portrays Trigorin.
But there is another layer of anxiety. After a frantic decade in which Clarke became a global superstar, had two brain haemorrhages and lost her beloved father to cancer, finally appearing in the West End is daunting because “it’s something I’ve wanted for so long”.
“It’s frightening because it’s a dream of mine finally realised,” she says.
All the more so because the production was due to open in March 2020, but closed after just four preview performances when the pandemic shut theatres.
“There is no higher art than theatre,” says the 35-year-old. “I adore it. I absolutely love it. I feel happiest, safest, most at home.”
Which might seem odd for an actress who has appeared on stage professionally only once before, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Broadway in 2013. It did not go well, with Ben Brantley in The New York Times describing her performance as the glamorous Holly Golightly as “an under-age debutante trying very, very hard to pass for a sophisticated grown-up”.
Meanwhile, David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter criticised the “miscasting” of Clarke, writing: “There’s neither softness nor fragility in her grating Holly.”
It was a “catastrophic failure”, Clarke cheerfully tells me.
