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APPEARANCES > 2020 > Jan 24: CliniqueiD Event with Global Brand Ambassador Emilia Clarke
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PHOTOSHOOTS & OUTTAKES > 2020 > 2020 Harper’s Bazaar (Russia)
MAGAZINES > 2020 > 2020 Harper’s Bazaar (Russia) – Feb
After plotting world domination for eight seasons on Game of Thrones, Clarke reflects on her own quieter sense of ambition, rooted in the “sustainable and real,” she says. Meanwhile, a new role as Clinique’s ambassador, announced today, puts her back on the global stage.
VANITY FAIR – Call it auspicious, to sit down with a former queen on the eve of a nail-biting election. It was a clear December morning in London, a day before Britons cast their fate (and Brexit’s) with Boris Johnson, and the Protector of the Realm—to use one of Emilia Clarke’s many titles on Game of Thrones—was assessing the political landscape. “Is it a full moon?” the actor said, interest piqued. (An Instagram astrologer had told me so.) “Maybe that will kick the . . . —no,” she interrupted herself with a weary laugh. “It will just soften the patriarchy ever so lightly.”
Clarke, whose now-departed character was known to scorch entire neighborhoods with one dragonic exhale, leads with a comparatively light hand. In a November post about the UK’s voter-registration deadline, she delivered a message (“You have a voice. Use it!”) with a silent procession of cue cards. Last March, when she first revealed her tumultuous medical history—a pair of brain aneurysms in the show’s early days—she did so with a lyrical, unsparing essay on the New Yorker’s website. She isn’t much for peddling influence; instead, she reps sweatshirts for Same You, the charity she founded to support neurorehabilitation for young patients. After the GOT series finale and its torrent of press, she has kept things earnest and under-the-radar—however much someone with 26 million followers can slip into incognito mode.
That makes Clarke’s latest role—the first global ambassador for the beauty company Clinique—at once a like-minded alliance and a return to the spotlight. “You’ve got your spidey senses,” explained the actor, sitting on a gray velvet sofa (a softer iron throne) at the Edition hotel. “My gut was like, ‘You’re going to enjoy this!’ ” At a time when authentic is a buzzword on every brand’s bingo card, she manages a kind of translucent candor. (The way Clarke described the brand’s longstanding image—“completely universal, totally relatable, totally modern”—sounds like the elevator pitch for tapping the 33-year-old as a spokesperson.) A sunbeam slipped across the room, igniting her lagoon-colored eyes. I found myself lilting precipitously off the sofa, like a wayward houseplant, to avoid casting a shadow.
Clinique, founded a half-century ago as a prescient, dermatologist-backed skin-care line, didn’t set out to sell miracles. The 1967 Vogue article that helped spark the company—titled “Can Great Skin Be Created?”—laid out a practical, yes-it-can mission. Back then (and for generations of beauty inductees since), demystification arrived by way of a streamlined three-step system: cleansing bar, exfoliating toner, familiar yellow moisturizer. In lieu of the smiling perfection of beauty ads, Irving Penn photographed heroic still lifes, making saints of ho-hum bathroom essentials.
Now, in an age of algorithm-generated everything, customization is the operative word. Clinique iD, which launched last year, riffs on that original moisturizer by targeting a cross-section of skin needs: four hydrating bases, five potent mix-ins, 20 different permutations. “You have options because we all change all the time,” said Clarke, who—to echo that classic Hair Club for Men slogan—is not only the face, she’s also a client. “I used the products, and my skin got better! I’m like, ‘Yes! I don’t need to lie!’ ” she added with a laugh. “It’s all true.”
Here is a lovely outtake from The Observer.
BROADWAY WORLD – Game of Thrones star, Emilia Clarke, will make her West End debut in Chekhov’s The Seagull at The Playhouse Theater.
According to a new report, Clarke will portray Nina in the new adaptation from Anya Reiss, which will be helmed by director Jamie Lloyd.
The Seagull will begin performances March 11, 2020 and play a limited run through May 30. Booking begins tomorrow. Tickets are available at https://t.co/8FH9dYk0ys?amp=1.
The Seagull premiered in 1896 and has since come to be regarded as the first major work of playwright Anton Chekhov.
Telling the story of the fallout from aging actress Irina’s decision to bring famous writer Trigorin home to her brother’s country estate, the play is a moving testament to writers, actors, and those who know them.
Clarke is best known for her eight years playing Daenerys Targaryen, the Mother of Dragons, on HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” She made her Broadway debut portraying Holly Golightly in Breakfast At Tiffany’s in 2013.
DAILY MAIL – Emilia Clarke discussed her torment over suffering from a second brain aneurysm in a new interview with Wonderland Magazine, on Friday.
The Game Of Thrones star, 33, revealed her fear that someone would recognise her while she was at her most vulnerable and fighting for her life.
Of being treated in hospital, she said: ‘[With] the second one, I lost a lot of hope; I lost a lot of optimism. That’s insane bad luck.
But there I was in a f***ing American hospital with drains coming out of my head, fully swollen, full of all the drugs they give you, and all I could think was, “please don’t recognise me, please don’t recognise me, please don’t recognise me.”‘
While she accepted that working on a show as popular as Game Of Thrones meant she ‘signed up for’ attention from fans wherever she goes, she explained some of the struggles she had while out during the tough period of her life.
‘This is where you very quickly sound like a complete f***king d**k because we signed up for this, we asked for this, it’s part of the job,’ she explained.
‘And then you’re in a shopping centre with your mum who is crying over your recently dead dad and someone comes up and asks you for a picture and you say no and they’re like, “I expected better from you, I thought more of you than that.”‘
Describing the incident as ‘scary as all hell,’ Emilia admitted the headache caused by the aneurysm ‘is the worst pain you can possibly imagine.’
‘As I was throwing up I knew I was being brain damaged, but I didn’t know how I knew. And I was like, no, f*** this, not today, it’s not happening.
‘I was wiggling fingers and toes, thinking of lines from the season, trying to do everything I could to keep myself conscious because I could feel myself slipping into a coma.’
Emilia went on to say: ‘I do feel like the brain haemorrhages are the literal, physical embodiment of what it is to be attacked on a social media, because I didn’t want to look anyone in the eye, and I didn’t want anyone to recognise me.
‘I wanted to disappear completely, to wipe myself off the face of the earth, because I couldn’t handle the level of interaction. Because I felt totally laid bare, totally vulnerable, totally in pain.’
She then admitted that playing Daenerys Targaryen in the hit fantasy series helped her through the ‘many waves of stuff to chew over – the fame, the brain haemorrhages, my dad dying.’
‘For me, the show became my escape from all of it. If I was changing, I wasn’t really aware of it. All the change was done for me,’ she said positively. ‘Because she did it. Daenerys Stormborn, Mother of Dragons. F***ing Game of F***ing Thrones.’
Emilia spoke candidly about her health scares in March earlier this year, when she revealed she underwent two life-saving surgeries in the course of eight years to correct two different aneurysm growths.
The film star also credited her mum for being the ‘greatest support’ as she tried to recover from the ordeal while battling with aphasia [loss of speech].
She said: ‘There was also my mum, when she went into mum superpower in the hospital: I had aphasia [loss of speech], and she looked at me and went, ‘Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.’
‘She made me believe she understood exactly what I was saying. It was genuinely her greatest moment.’
Following her health battle, Emilia launched the charity SameYou, which helps raise money for people recovering from brain injuries and strokes.
She also became an ambassador for the Royal College of Nursing in 2018, after being met with ‘kind’ nurses during her time in hospital.
Read the full interview in Wonderland Magazine, which is available now.
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APPEARANCES > 2019 > Dec 2: The Fashion Awards 2019 – Red Carpet
APPEARANCES > 2019 > Dec 2: The Fashion Awards 2019 – Backstage
APPEARANCES > 2019 > Dec 2: The Fashion Awards 2019 – Show
THE GUARDIAN – As she stars in this year’s Christmas feelgood movie, Emilia Clarke talks about the intense scrutiny of Game of Thrones, how she coped with the brain haemorrhage that almost killed her – and why we all need to escape reality sometimes
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PHOTOSHOOTS & OUTTAKES > 2019 > 2019 The Guardian
MAGAZINES > 2019 > 2019 The Observer – Dec 1
Emilia Clarke had a headache. It was 2011, just before Valentine’s Day and just after she’d wrapped on the first series of Game of Thrones, playing Daenerys Targaryen, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons. She didn’t yet know, as she crawled into the locker room of her local gym in north London and vomited bile into the toilet, that Game of Thrones would run for seven further seasons, break Emmy-award records for most wins for a scripted television series and for a drama, be named one of the greatest TV shows of all time, and quickly come to define her. But there was much she didn’t know.
She didn’t know that at 24 she had suffered a life-threatening stroke, a subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH) caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain. She didn’t know, as she lay on the floor repeating lines from Game of Thrones in order to test her memory, that a third of SAH patients die immediately, or that those who survive require urgent treatment to avoid a second, often fatal bleed. She didn’t know there was another swollen blood vessel in her brain, which had doubled in size by the time she finished filming season three. She didn’t know that one day, eight years later, over biscuits on her pink sofa, she would be smiling with the dark realisation that her stroke was one of the best things that could have happened to her.
Her pink sofa is in her pink house, which is also green and blue and muted shades of rust, and has a secret bar hidden in a courtyard shed, and an outdoor screening room heated by a wood-burning stove. To walk into her living room, where one corner is painted with a symbol relating to her mum, another to her late dad, and a third with a meaningful dragon, is to enter the cosiest corner of Clarke’s mind. By the stairs, horsehair is visible in the plaster; the walls are stripped back to the bone. She shows me round with a raw sort of glee, a sense that her comfort and safety are bound into the details: the friends’ art on the walls, the “single girl’s” bedroom. She moved in after Game of Thrones; in this and many ways, her life can be cleanly dissected into before and after.
Before, Clarke, now 33, who grew up in Oxfordshire, had appeared in a single episode of the daytime soap Doctors. She was ambitious, optimistic and relentlessly cheerful. After, after Game of Thrones, and the death of her father, which shook her family, as did her life-threatening stroke, she is sitting on her pink sofa and contemplating a decade that changed her.
“And yes, I’m at the point where I definitely think of the brain haemorrhage as a good thing,” she nods. She has extremely expressive eyebrows that appear jointed – for every word Clarke says, and she says many, they add 15 more. “Because I was never destined to be the ‘young actor goes off the rails’ type, up and down the gossip columns. And having a brain haemorrhage that coincided precisely with the beginning of my career and the beginning of a show that became something quite meaty, it gave me a perspective that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.” She pauses. “I’m quite a resilient human being, so a parent dying and brain haemorrhages coinciding with success and people following you in the street and getting stalkers – you’re just, like, ‘Well let’s try and make something sensible of it.’”
It was a decade that contained the very best and very worst of a life, and one of the sensible things she tried to make of it was the founding of a charity, SameYou, to provide treatment for people recovering from brain injuries and stroke. It was only in order to promote the charity that, eight years after her stroke, she finally decided to talk about it, in a piece for the New Yorker. “On the set, I didn’t miss a beat, but I struggled,” she wrote, of returning to Game of Thrones after brain surgery. “Season two would be my worst. I didn’t know what Daenerys was doing. If I am truly being honest, every minute of every day I thought I was going to die.”
It’s remarkable, considering her profile and her regular appearances in the Daily Mail in lovely dresses and grand smiles, that she managed to keep it secret for so long. She didn’t want to tell strangers, “Because it was mine.” She feared, too, that people would “sneer at it”.
It so happened that, the week before I went to meet her, I had a similar (though less dramatic) neurological diagnosis – when I tell her about it, for some reason my voice shakes. She is warm and quick with recommendations, and as she continues she says, “Well, you know, then. You know the worries. That people will think your soul, your movement, your voice, who you were,” was damaged. “It was nerve-racking to share it, to be honest. It always is, when you make yourself vulnerable.” She waited so long to talk about it, because, “I didn’t want people to think of me as… sick.”
There are still days on set when she will quietly pull aside the makeup person and say, “‘I think I’m having a brain haemorrhage. I’m not, I promise, but maybe just put me in a cold tent and we’ll sit down for a second, and I apologise in advance if I freak you out.’ Over the summer I was burning the candle at both ends, and I was with my mate on the plane. And I was like, ‘Dude, I feel really weird…’ But I was fine. It’s hard not to think the worst. It’s hard to think you’re overtired, or you’ve been on Instagram too long, and to realise these might have the same side-effects as something deadly. But the charity evolves with me. I use it. Here’s something else that I feel: maybe someone else feels the same way.”
She talks about the summer just gone with a regretful kind of wonder – it was th e summer after the Game of Thrones finale had divided fans, when she was coming to terms with how the “overwhelming” amount of nudity in the first season had affected her. And, after years of “filling every hiatus with a movie, shit, good or otherwise” (she starred opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator Genisys, and as Qi’ra in Solo: a Star Wars Story) she had decided to take a break. Or, the decision was made for her.
“After we did the premiere for the last season, it felt suddenly like I lost all of the bones in my body. And I was in this puddle on the floor going, ‘Maybe this isn’t just the show.’ I’d never wanted to look around and see what we had, because I was convinced it was just going to blow up in our faces. And, well, at the end it kind of did. So I kept my head down. Then, after the premiere, I finally was able to stop, and that was difficult.” She travelled and went “raving with my mates, but that was not fulfilling. So, bloated and exhausted I went away for two weeks with my best girlfriend, [The Good Fight star] Rose Leslie, and it was in this retreat in India that I suddenly got it. This is what stopping feels like. And I was able to finally… be kind to myself.”
