Enchanting Emilia Clarke

October 12 2020

Press: Game of Thrones Cast Speaks Out on Early Sex Scenes ‘It Was Supposed To Be a Closed Set’

SYFY – HBO’s Game of Thrones wasn’t your average fantasy epic. It was grim, dirty, violent, and sexual. In fact, it had such frequent and graphic nudity that it helped coin the phrase “sexposition” when referring to plot exposition being doled out by a nude character. But according to a new book, the experiences of the cast in these intimate scenes left plenty to be desired — especially in the hit show’s early, scrappy days.

James Hibberd’s new oral history Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series digs into this plenty, including interviews with everyone from Khal Drogo’s Jason Momoa to Cersei’s body double, Rebecca Van Cleave. Few were complementary to the series’ handling of its sex scenes, most of which took place long before HBO mandated hiring intimacy coordinators for all its shows in 2018.

Momoa took first-time showrunners D. B. Weiss and David Benioff’s unprofessional handling of the situations in stride, though he needed to sometimes refuse their requests. Momoa recalled a time while shooting a Season 1 sex scene when he placed the intimacy pouch (which covers an actor’s genitals in nude scenes) in Benioff’s hand: “That was because David had been like, ‘Momoa, just take it off!’ You know, giving me s***. ‘Sacrifice! Do it for your art!’ I’m just like, ‘F*** you, bro. My wife would be pissed. That’s for one lady only, man.'”

Momoa added: “So afterward I ripped the thing off and kept it in my hand and gave him a big hug and a handshake and was like, ‘Hey, now you have a little bit of me on you, buddy.'”

His scene partner, Daenerys Targaryen actress Emilia Clarke, has spoken at length about her uncomfortable experiences doing nudity on the show. “Because Jason had experience — he was an experienced actor who had done a bunch of stuff before coming on to this — he was like, ‘Sweetie, this is how it’s meant to be, this is how it’s not meant to be, and I’m going to make sure that that’s the f***ing gaze,’ Clarke said on the podcast Armchair Expert. “He was always like, ‘Can we get her a f***ing robe? She’s shivering!’ … He was so kind and considerate and cared about me as a human being.”

“I was so desperate to be the most professional actor I could be that I’d be like, ‘Yeah, sure,’ for anything they threw at me,” Clarke said in Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon. “I’ll just cry about it in the bathroom later, whatever, you won’t know.”

The actress, who appeared fully nude in sex scenes and when Daenerys is “reborn” in fire alongside her dragons, spoke about the pressures of being an actress fresh from drama school on that set. “Those were tough days,” she said of the first season, adding, “I’ve had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up.’”

Misleading promises from production reportedly ranged from people sneaking onto a closed set to a supposedly closed set being thrown wide open. Hodor actor Kristian Nairn remembered during his Season 1 nude scene (“probably the most traumatic day of my life,” he previously said), when a prosthetic was worn because there was a child in the scene. Alas, things did not go as planned.

“I was s*** scared, but I did it because of the whole body-positive thing — Game of Thrones has a lot of people of different shapes and sizes, probably more than any other show ever,” Nairn said. “It was a very busy day on set, which was the opposite of what they told me. I’ve never seen a busier set!”

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October 02 2020

Press: Emilia Clarke discusses filming Game of Thrones scenes after brain surgery

Daenerys Targaryen star on powering through season 2 during a secret health struggle: “I had the Willy Wonka golden ticket. I wasn’t about to hand that in.”

EW – Emilia Clarke wasn’t feeling well.

It was September 2012. Game of Thrones was filming an intense season 2 scene in a sun-drenched quarry in Croatia. Clarke was in costume as Daenerys Targaryen, standing before the towering Gates of Qarth, demanding the city’s leaders provide refuge to her and the tattered remains of her weary khalasar. “Turn us away and we will burn you first!” she warned.

As usual when playing the character, Clarke’s long, dark hair was smushed into a bald cap glued onto her head, and then a tight blond wig was affixed on top of that. Standing in the intense heat, hour after hour, Clarke felt like her skull was baking. Later, the actress bowed out of a scheduled interview due to “heatstroke.” As Clarke cheerfully explained later that week, “Oh, the other day? I just had a bit of a ‘can’t cope with the heat’ moment. . . .”

Clarke wouldn’t reveal the deeper and far more serious reason for her exhaustion for another eight years. After filming Thrones season one, the acclaimed Thrones star had suffered a brain hemorrhage at a gym in London. “I immediately felt as though an elastic band were squeezing my brain,” Clarke wrote in The New Yorker. As she was rushed to the hospital, Clarke recalled lines of Daenerys Targaryen’s dialogue to try to calm herself. The actress underwent emergency surgery and for several days couldn’t even remember her own name, let alone speeches in Dothraki.

Somehow, just weeks later, Clarke returned to work on Thrones despite still having a second growth on her brain that a doctor said might— in theory, though it was unlikely—“pop at any time.”

Day after day on set, Clarke continued to deliver her usual ferocious performance as Daenerys Targaryen without giving any indication of her fatigue, fear, and pain. Only a few people who worked on the show had any idea what the actress was really going through.

In my upcoming book, Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, Clarke and others recounted what it was like on the set after the actress experienced a traumatic injury that would have completely sidelined so many others.

EMILIA CLARKE (Daenerys Targaryen): It was crazy intense. We are in the desert in a quarry in like ninety-degree heat, and I had the consistent fear that I was going to have another brain hemorrhage. I spent a lot time just being like: “Am I gonna die? Is that gonna happen on set? Because that would be really inconvenient.” And with any kind of brain injury it leaves you with a fatigue that’s indescribable. I was trying so hard to keep it under wraps.

BRYAN COGMAN (co-executive producer): Only a very select few people knew about that. I was completely unaware. I heard a little bit that she had some problems between seasons, but nothing to that extent. And I had no clue while we were shooting.

ALAN TAYLOR (director): We were afraid for her. She’s so brave, because it never affected her commitment to the work.

EMILIA CLARKE: If I had called my doctor, he would have been like, “Dude, you just need to chill out.” But I still felt blind fear, and the fear was making me panic, and the panic was leading me to feel like I’m going to pass out in the desert. So they brought in an air-conditioned car for me—sorry, planet.

DAN WEISS (showrunner): It was terrifying because this amazing, sweet, wonderful human being came this close to not being around anymore— this person we loved so much after just one year. Obviously you need to make the show, but the important thing was making sure she was in a safe situation. You ask yourself: Is she as safe doing this show as if she was not doing it? If she was home sitting on her couch? She was so gung-ho, the main thing for us was making sure she wouldn’t put herself [in dangerous situations]. She would say: “Yeah, I just had brain surgery and if I need to gallop on a horse down a mountainside, I’ll do it.” You would have to tell her no because she would never say no.

EMILIA CLARKE: In all of my years on the show, I never put self-health first, which is probably why everyone else was worrying, as they could see that. They didn’t want to work me too hard. I was like: “Don’t think I’m a failure; don’t think I can’t do the job that I’ve been hired to do. Please don’t think I’m going to f–k up at any moment.” I had the Willy Wonka golden ticket. I wasn’t about to hand that in.

Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon – the complete uncensored story of making Thrones – is released Tuesday, Oct. 6 and available for preorder.

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July 08 2020

Press: Emilia Pens Emotional Thank You Letter to Health Care Workers Who ‘Saved My Life’

PEOPLE – The Game of Thrones star shows her gratitude to the health care workers who helped her recover from a brain aneurysm in 2011

Emilia Clarke has penned a heartfelt thank you letter to the hospital staff who saved her life, following her sudden collapse with a brain aneurysm in February 2011.

“The memories I will hold dearest … are ones that fill me with awe,” the Game of Thrones star writes in the new book Dear NHS: 100 Stories to Say Thank You, which is dedicated to the thousands of cooks, cleaners, porters and medical staff working to defeat the coronavirus pandemic in the UK’s National Health Service.

“In all those moments, over those three weeks, I was not, not ever, truly alone,” she writes.

Clarke first revealed that she underwent two life-saving brain surgeries in a March 2019 essay for The New Yorker, where she said she became “violently, voluminously ill” midway through a workout with her personal trainer in London.

A hospital MRI scan later diagnosed a life-threatening form of stroke known as a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain.

“If I was to live and avoid terrible deficits, I would have to have urgent surgery,” she told The New Yorker. “And, even then, there were no guarantees.”

The letter also pays tribute to the nurse who first suggested she have a brain scan following her admission to the emergency room.

“She saved my life,” says Clarke, before going on to thank “The surgeon whose skill, quick thinking and sheer determination” also prevented the worst, “while never letting on how close to death I had been.”

She also has special thanks for her anesthesiologist, who she says “miraculously” kept her entire family giggling as he talked Clarke through “the process of what was about to happen to my brain and then counted me down from 10.”

The actress underwent a three-hour surgery and spent four days in an ICU following her sudden collapse, which happened soon after wrapping filming on the first season of Game of Thrones.

The after-effects of the treatment were also devastating: As a result of her brain trauma, Clarke developed a condition called aphasia which caused her to forget her own name, pushing her into a deep depression that left her wanting “to pull the plug” on her life.

“I asked the medical staff to let me die,” she told The New Yorker.

Her letter to the NHS goes on to describe how the hospital staff pulled her through those dark days, including the children’s phlebotomist who was drafted in to take blood from her “tiny hidden veins,” to the cooks who made her “fish in white sauce with peas every day” because it was the only thing she could physically keep down.

Clarke also has a special message of gratitude to the hospital cleaners “who mopped the floor when my bedpan fell to the ground, shame and embarrassment filling the room along with disinfectant, and then a reassuring smile and a knowledge that they’d seen worse.”

Yet it is “the countless unthanked nurses” who receive most gratitude from Clarke, particularly those who put her in pajamas “with as much kindness as if I had been their own daughter,” she says.

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June 20 2020

Press: Emilia Clarke and her puppy Ted read a children’s book to try and raise money for kids in need

INSIDER: “Game of Thrones” actress Emilia Clarke made a rare video appearance with her new puppy (a small Daschund named Ted) as part of ongoing efforts to raise charity funds during the coronavirus pandemic. Appearing on the “Save With Stories” Instagram page, the video shows Clarke reading a full children’s book called “Bear’s Loose Tooth.”

“Hi everybody, my name’s Emilia,” Clarke begins in the video. But she’s quickly overwhelmed with giggles as Ted licks her face. You can hear the person filming the video also gasping for breath between bursts of laughter.

“This is my Teddy,” Clarke says. “He is called Ted and he’s a little puppy. And we’d love to read you a story. So — are you sitting comfortably? Are you lying? Are you cuddled next to someone really big and squidgy or someone really little and furry, like this boy here?”

Clarke proceeds to turn to a nearby laptop, which is facing the camera and showing a PDF version of the Simon & Schuster children’s book “Bear’s Loose Tooth,” written by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman.

The whole story takes just about four minutes to read, and then Clarke signs off.

“I hope you’re all doing very well,” Clarke says. “And I’m sending you lots and lots of love. Bye!”

The “Save With Stories” Instagram page currently has dozens of similar videos on its page. Stars including Chris Evans, Gabrielle Union, Kelly Clarkson, Jennifer Garner, and more have recorded themselves reading kids’ books out loud.

As the caption on Clarke’s video explains, “Save With Stories” is a new partnership from Save the Children and No Kid Hungry — organizations built to help children in need.

The new program is raising funds to “support food banks, and mobile meal trucks, and community feeding programs with funds to do what they do best — and also — with educational toys, books, and worksheets to make sure brains are full, as well as bellies.”

The coronavirus pandemic has led to the closure of schools across the US. This new program is designed to help keep kids now stuck at home entertained, and also raise funds at the same time. You can learn more about “Save With Stories” here.

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June 20 2020

Press: Emilia Clarke stars in new trailer for horror anthology Murder Manual

DIGITAL SPY – Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke is back on screens in a creepy trailer for horror anthology Murder Manual.

The anthology, now available to watch on Amazon Prime, features a short film called Shackled – which Emilia starred in back in 2012.

Shackled follows the story of Malu (Clarke) who is released from her chains at a circus by her husband Jesse (Hadley Fraser) only to be haunted by a disturbing memory that she’d previously forgotten.

Seven other stories complete the anthology.

The Murder Manual trailer comes as Emilia’s West End play The Seagull had its scheduled run cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Additionally, it follows the actress recently admitted she felt “annoyed” about Jon Snow’s (Kit Harrington) ending in Game of Thrones, which saw Jon kill Daenerys (Clarke) and then escape beyond the wall after being sent to the Night’s Watch.

“Yeah, I felt for (Dany),” she told The Times. “I really felt for her.”

“And yeah, was I annoyed that Jon Snow didn’t have to deal with something? He got away with murder – literally.”

Emilia also recently revealed the gift her brother stole from the Game of Thrones set for her and said she was “in hell” speaking Dothraki in Dany’s big battle scene.

Totally pulled it off, though.

Murder Manuel is available on Amazon Prime now.