Emilia Clarke and Regina Hall spent the TV season playing characters who break through the boys’ club. Clarke, on HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” was Daenerys, the dragon queen whose will to power has brought her on an eight-season journey to the heart of the action in Westeros. Hall, a TV veteran, infiltrates a different center of power on Showtime’s comedy “Black Monday,” as the lone woman in a 1980s Wall Street firm.
The English star was constantly afraid of being killed off the show, saying, “I just assumed every impostor syndrome times a million.”
With HBO’s Game of Thrones never shying from saying goodbye to characters, star Emilia Clarke admits that she was constantly afraid of being killed off the show. “On the show you have the phone call,” Clarke shared during The Hollywood Reporter’s Drama Actress Roundtable.
“You get a call from David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss], who are the creators of the show, and everyone starts to really dread that phone call,” Clarke said, whose character survived to make it to the series finale. “That’s the kiss of death.”
“I started so green and was so incredibly grateful to be employed, I just assumed every impostor syndrome times a million,” Clarke continued. “I just assumed that every time I read the script I was going to be written off because I was just crap, and that they had had enough, and that this time was the last time.”
The actress went on to share the time she knew she had made it in Hollywood when she auctioned off the chance to watch an episode of Game of Thrones with her, only to discover that Brad Pitt had joined the bidding war. “He didn’t ultimately win,” she said, but, “it was the most ridiculous, surreal moment of my entire existence.”
(SPOILER): Clarke starred as Queen Daenerys Targaryen in the Emmy Award-winning series. Daenerys died at the hand of Jon Snow on Sunday’s series finale.
The full Drama Actress Roundtable airs July 7 on SundanceTV. Clarke stars on the roundtable along with Patricia Arquette, Christine Baranski, Danai Gurira, Niecy Nash and Michelle Williams.
Emilia Clarke read a paragraph in the final script for Game of Thrones.
She read it again and again. Seven times, she says, she read the words that revealed the devastating fate of Daenerys Targaryen, a character she’s portrayed on the HBO global phenomenon for nearly a decade.
“What, what, what, WHAT!?” the actress recalls thinking. “Because it comes out of f—king nowhere. I’m flabbergasted. Absolutely never saw that coming.”
It was October 2017. The actress had recently completed filming Solo: A Star Wars Story and had just returned to London following a brief vacation. She electronically received the scripts the moment she landed at Heathrow and recalls that she “completely flipped out,” turned to her traveling companion and said, “‘Oh my god! I gotta go! I gotta go!’ And they’re like, ‘You gotta get your bags!’”
Once at home, the actress prepared herself. “I got myself situated,” she says. “I got my cup of tea. I had to physically prepare the space and then begin reading them.”
Clarke swiped through pages: Daenerys arrives at Winterfell and Sansa doesn’t like her. She discovers Jon Snow is the true heir to the Iron Throne and isn’t thrilled. She fights in the battle against the Night King and survives, but loses longtime friend and protector Ser Jorah Mormont. Then her other close friend and advisor Missandei dies too. Varys betrays her. Jon Snow pulls away. Having lost half her army, two dragons, and nearly everybody she cares about, Daenerys goes full Tagaryen to win: She attacks King’s Landing and kills … thousands of civilians? Daenerys’ longtime conquest achieved, she meets with Jon Snow in the Red Keep throne room and … and then … then he …
“I cried,” Clarke says. “And I went for a walk. I walked out of the house and took my keys and phone and walked back with blisters on my feet. I didn’t come back for five hours. I’m like, ‘How am I going to do this?’”
Gallery Links:
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Episode Stills > 8×06 – “The Iron Throne”
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Episode Screencaps > 8×06 – “The Iron Throne”
- PHOTOSHOOTS & OUTTAKES > 2019 > 2019 Vogue (Spain)
- MAGAZINES > 2019 > 2019 Vogue Spain – May
As Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones, Emilia Clarke created a warrior queen for the ages. Her legend can be told on the walls of caves or on T-shirts at Comic-Con. But behind the Valkyrie wigs and very testy dragons, Clarke has an inspiring origin story of her own.
A valley sprawls before her, rich with every color of green in the kingdom, reaching out to a twinkling city, which borders the infinite sea. Her hair (tinted not with peroxide, but tiny flecks of actual gold) glows with a radiance that makes the setting sun so jealous it hides behind the surrounding mountains, and the evening sky blushes. She is Daenerys Targaryen, Queen of the Andals, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea. Everything in sight belongs to her.
Just kidding! She is Emilia Clarke, sitting high above Beverly Hills in a glass mansion rented for a magazine cover shoot. So high up that passing aircraft rattle the bones of the house and those inside it. So high up that you can see Santa Catalina Island in the distance, peeking out from behind a curtain of fog. She laughs about something the makeup artist says, and the last of the evening light bounces off of her cheekbones and shoots into the camera lens.
We are in the sky to talk about Clarke’s reign as one of the most preeminent television actresses of our time, as Daenerys on Game of Thrones. But first, I have a few questions about her abandoned career as a jazz singer.
Clarke’s default emotion is joy — her resting heart rate seems to be just below that of someone seconds after winning a medium-expensive raffle prize — but it quickly congeals into theatrical horror when I reveal that I know that she is a casual but talented singer of jazz music.
