In EW’s exclusive look at theSkimm’s Texting With, the actress adds another suspect in the ongoing saga.
EW: After nearly two years, Emilia Clarke appears to be reigniting the mystery of who left a coffee cup in a scene from the final season of Game of Thrones.
While answering questions for theSkimm’s digital series, Texting With, Clarke, who played Daenerys Targaryen on the HBO series, addressed that infamous paper coffee cup that was spotted by eagle-eyed fans in front of the queen during a feast at Winterfell in “The Last of the Starks.”
Clarke brought up the subject herself when she found herself answering a question about her morning drink of choice during the Texting With episode, which EW has an exclusive look at below.
“It’s not Starbucks – spoiler,” she said. “I’m going to say it again for the record: was not mine. Looking at you Dan Weiss.”
Weiss, an executive producer of GoT alongside David Benioff, didn’t take credit for the hot beverage in an excerpt (via The Hollywood Reporter) from James Hibberd’s book, Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon.
“I’d seen that shot one thousand times, and we’re always looking at their faces or how the shot sat with the shots on either side of it,” Weiss said in the book. “I felt like we were the participants in a psychology experiment, like where you don’t see the gorillas running around in the background because you’re counting the basketballs. Every production that’s ever existed had things like this. You can see a crew member in Braveheart; there’s an actor wearing a wristwatch in Spartacus. But now people can rewind things and everybody is talking to each other in real time. So one person saw the coffee cup, rewound it, and then everybody did.”
With that said, previously, during a visit to NBC’s The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon in Oct. 2019, Clarke actually singled out another cast mate instead – Conleth Hill, who played Lord Varys.
“Here’s the truth. We had like a party before the Emmys recently, and Conleth [Hill], kay? He plays Varys. He’s sitting next to me in that scene. He pulls me aside and he’s like, ‘Emilia, I’ve got to tell you something. I’ve got to tell you something, love. The coffee cup was mine.’ It was his. It was Conleth’s coffee cup. He said so,” she told Fallon.
Others, though, like Sophie Turner, who played Sansa Stark, visited Fallon and suggested it was Clarke’s.
No matter whose it was, the cup was quickly edited out of the scene, with HBO releasing a statement at the same time: “In response to inquiries from those who saw a craft services coffee cup in Sunday night’s episode of Game of Thrones… The latte that appeared in the episode was a mistake. Daenerys had ordered an herbal tea.”
Watch EW’s exclusive video from theSkimm to find out which storyline from GoT Clarke would’ve changed, and the Friends star she freaked out over after they commented on one of her Instagram posts.
TheSkimm’s Texting With Emilia Clarke debuts on theSkimm’s Instagram and at theskimm.com Thursday at 9 p.m. ET.
VOGUE – Since 2015, Chanel and Tribeca Enterprises (founded by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal) have selected young, female and/or nonbinary filmmakers to participate in their joint mentorship fund competition Through Her Lens. The candidates, a group of about 10, get paired up with mentors—experts in script-to-screen development, casting, music composition, costume design, producing, and directing—and because Chanel is involved, the group is always top-notch, made up of the discerning sorts of figures you might expect to see sitting front row. They include Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Diane Kruger, Julianne Moore, Katie Holmes, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathryn Bigelow; while the likes of A.V. Rockwell, Nikyatu Jusu, and Hannah Peterson have competed, going on to screen their work at Sundance, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the BlackStar Film Festival.
In years past, Through Her Lens has kicked off with a luncheon, usually at De Niro’s Locanda Verde in New York, that unfolds like a parade of Chanel-clad film-industry talents. In the three days that follow, participants get one-on-one mentoring sessions and master classes dedicated to the development of short film projects. The program culminates with a lucky three being awarded grant money to help realize their films. This year, there will be no tweedy lunch or face-to-face mentorship sessions, but Chanel and Tribeca Enterprises are committed to continuing the program 2020 style: virtually.
Ahead of this year’s lineup, we caught up with Emilia Clarke, who will serve as mentors alongside Glenn Close, Niki Caro, Lucy Boynton, and Uzo Aduba. Calling her involvement “an absolute no-brainer,” the former Game of Thrones star rang from London, and her firecracker enthusiasm could be felt through the transatlantic call. She’s been at home for much of 2020, which has allowed her the time to develop projects for her own production company and to work with her charity, Same You, dedicated to brain injury recovery. Through Her Lens is just another chance for Clarke to give back. Below, she stresses the value of mentorship, the need to know your references and the glorious benefits of binge-watching cinema.
How did you first hear about Through Her Lens?
I got a call from my rep telling me about Through Her Lens. As soon as I heard about it, I was like, “Damn straight. I am so in!” I did a judging panel for the BFI last year and it was so fulfilling and amazing. I really passionately care about new voices being heard, especially when those voices are female, so this was an absolute no-brainer. It’s kind of funny because you’re sort of like, well, what can I bring to the table? What experiences can I share that might be beneficial to someone coming into the industry? Because Lord knows I would have loved [a mentor] for myself! I think that when you’re a female in this industry, you do have a slightly singular experience. And I think that it’s becoming increasingly valuable for us women to talk to each other.
What experiences and advice will you share with your mentees?
An understanding of what I’ve learned and what to expect; what you can push back on and what the environment you are being sent into is like. Because everybody starts with, largely speaking, a wide-eyed, optimistic gaze, and I think that the best way to have your stories told and heard is by understanding the environment you’re walking into. And now, as a producer as well, I see a whole other side of things, which is teaching me a lot as an actor and will definitely be valuable to a young filmmaker or a new voice.
You mentioned you wished you had more of a mentor. Could you expand on that?
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TIME – Emilia Clarke—known for displaying strength as Daenerys Targaryen and exuding warmth in movies like Last Christmas and Me Before You—is no stranger to hospitals and healthcare workers. After suffering two brain aneurysms starting in 2011, her road to recovery brought her to a deep appreciation for the care she received during her journey back to health—and to want to enable others with brain injuries to find similar resources, the actor shared in a TIME100 Talks that aired on Sept. 24.
Clarke’s own experiences have provided her with what she called an “armor of sorts” to face the pandemic. “When you personally come very close to dying—which I did twice—it brings into light a conversation which you have with yourself which goes to the tune of: appreciation for the things you have in your life, thanks for the people who are here,” she said.
SameYou, Clarke’s brain injury recovery charity, attempts to help serve that purpose. But like many other organizations this year, SameYou has felt the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“People with brain injuries were leaving hospital early,” she said. “My heart was bleeding for all the people who weren’t able to get what I was able to get.” Experimenting with new virtual ways to connect with brain injury patients has presented its own silver linings, however. “COVID has paradoxically been quite an incredible moment for us to really assess that properly and see: how are the ways, during a global pandemic, can we reach out and make people not feel alone?”
Clarke also discussed the “collective grief” she thinks we are all facing, and the empathy that it might engender. “What can come out of this is the knowledge that this stuff we place so much importance on the, the things, the materialistic things, take a backseat,” she said. “When you feel bad, when you feel low, when you feel sad, when you feel scared—I think there’s a societal setup for you to grab for more to fix it, to kind of cover it. When really what you need is to strip it back and be introspective and reflective where possible. That’s the thing that’s going to last you for the rest of your life.”
While Clarke’s on-camera work has been on hold, she’s stayed active reading poetry on her social media and participating in things like a theatrical table read of a play with her friend and colleague Emma Thompson, who also wrote her TIME100 tribute in 2019, with proceeds going to charity. And when it comes to returning to showbiz, Clarke—who has been vocal about the issues she faced on the Game of Thrones set—is optimistic about how the industry has changed. “There are [now] things like intimacy coaches, which is wonderful, and something that was very far away from my experience,” she said.
Lately, she’s particularly encouraged by movements toward representative storytelling. “Whose stories are we hearing? Who are we hearing? That’s vital. Inclusivity of humanity—of everybody—there’s not enough representation,” she said. “I believe it’s coming. That’s something I care about, and the way that audiences can support that is by watching things … and giving them big box office numbers. It’s a business.”
Expanding the breadth of stories we see on screen is good for everyone, she added: “The world will be richer for it.”
Clarke’s approach right now is earnest hope. “I just keep saying the cheesiest things, but I believe in humanity, I believe in us. It’s chilling that it takes a global pandemic to make a bunch of us stop and assess and see what we have. But I’m hopeful that our healthcare workers and our frontline workers are going to be supported forever,” she said. “I’m hopeful that in the wake of Black Lives Matter and everything that’s happened around that, we will continue to see stories from everyone. I’m hopeful that when we’re not fighting a virus that doesn’t care where you come from or how much money you have, we’ll still say, ‘Oh, we’re on the same side!’”
Emilia Clarke interview: the Game of Thrones star on leaving Westeros behind to tackle the West End
Clarke, who now stars in Chekhov’s The Seagull, tells Louis Wise that the HBO fantasy series made her feel like a ‘small cog in a big machine’
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PHOTOSHOOTS & OUTTAKES > 2020 > 2020 The Sunday Times
MAGAZINES > 2020 > 2020 The Sunday Times Culture Magazine – March 15
The Times: Emilia Clarke says she views herself primarily as a stage actress, which is a little weird when you consider that she has only appeared in one play professionally before, and it was an absolute turkey. Or, as the 33-year-old star of Game of Thrones says, in her jolly British way, it was “terrible, awful, awful! Bad! That was a bad show!” The piece was Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Broadway in 2013, and it’s safe to say Clarke’s Holly Golightly did not enchant. “I’ll never forget, someone said to me after press night the only thing they liked was the cat.”
If Clarke relays this with surprising good humour, this is part temperament, part experience. For one thing, in person she is relentlessly chipper and pukka. Whereas on HBO’s mega-fantasy series Game of Thrones, she grew in stature as Daenerys Targaryen, a still, dignified stateswoman (until that end), in real life she is a goofy motormouth chatterbox, always eager to catch the joke at her expense. And she is no stranger to what we shall politely call “the mixed review”. She has known some drubbings, whether for that Broadway show, or films such as Last Christmas or Terminator Genisys, or indeed the final series of GoT, which — euphemism alert! — didn’t quite turn out the way everybody wanted.
Luckily she never reads reviews. “Because if it’s really, really good, someone will tell you. And if it’s really, really bad — some f***** will tell you.”
We are meeting today, though, at a rehearsal space in south London, because she is chucking herself back into the fray. For only her second stage appearance, Clarke is going straight into the West End, in Chekhov’s The Seagull, and taking on the prestigious role of Nina. If she is nervous, she’s handling it in the usual way, which is to say with huge blasts of good cheer.
Two clichés about meeting starsis that they are a) smaller than you thought, but b) their features are stronger than expected. Both are true of Clarke. She is tiny, proper Kylie-tiny, nicely decked out in a gauzy beige-cream knit, some fashionably frayed jeans and pointy, well-worn white cowboy boots. Yet her eyes and grin look extra big: if she stays still, she’s a dainty doll, but as soon as she moves it’s Looney Tunes. To be clear, she never stays still.
This energy feels helpful, as we have a lot to pack in. After all, Clarke’s past decade has been particularly wild. Not only did she rocket suddenly to fame in GoT (until then, her only screen credit was an episode of Doctors), she also lost her father to cancer in 2016 and, as she revealed in 2019, had suffered a sequence of brain haemorrhages in her early twenties, just as the madness of GoT was kicking off.
Even the Mother of Dragons gets sick. A slightly congested Emilia Clarke mentions she’s getting over the flu as we talk on the phone days after the Academy Awards. Apparently, going to the Oscars and hitting up Beyonce’s private after party didn’t help with her recovery. (“I basically cried at her,” she gushes over the experience.) But what’s one night of feeling ill on the red carpet when you’ve spent months filming battle scenes in wintery Northern Ireland in the most grueling conditions? If Khaleesi could make it to Winterfell alive, then Clarke could survive the climax of awards season with the flu.
Throughout Clarke’s nearly decade-long tenure as queen Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones, we’ve seen her walk through fire unburnt, devour a horse heart, and fly on the back of dragons. But in the fantasy juggernaut’s eighth and final season, which premieres April 14, Dany will find herself in completely new territory: at Winterfell with the Starks, on the brink of a war against the undead.
“She starts feeling pretty cocksure and confident, and then stuff happens,” Clarke tells BAZAAR.com of Dany’s arrival North and her first encounter with Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), which HBO teased in early promos.
Clarke’s casting as the platinum-haired heir to the Iron Throne was first announced in 2010. She’s grown a lot since then; Season 1 Emilia and Season 8 Emilia are “two incredibly different women,” Clarke says.
As she moves on from the Thrones world, she already has other projects lined up, like the holiday rom-com Last Christmas (co-written by Emma Thompson) opposite Henry Golding. She previously hit the big screen in 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, 2016’s Me Before You, and 2014’s Terminator Genisys. Clarke also landed a covetable role in the beauty sphere, as the face of Dolce & Gabbana’s The Only One fragrance, available now. In the ads, she’s a charming Italian chanteuse who breaks into song over dinner in Rome—a far cry from Khaleesi.
But nothing can compare to her experience on GoT, for better or worse. “Game of Thrones is probably the hardest shooting I’ll do, because it is so physical and you’re in a corset!” she emphasizes. “You’ve got the physical places of where you are, the weather is so extreme, and the hours are really long and there’s so much tension in each character towards the end. There’s so much tension in the room, and you’re concentrating so hard. It’s strenuous.”
After a long day on set, Clarke’s self-care routine ends with the ultimate release: “Taking off your goddamn bra and getting into your pajamas.” She’s also religious about removing her makeup (“You’ve put a lot on by the end of the day”), then cleansing and moisturizing every night. And once she’s in her PJs with a hot water bottle, it’s over for y’all.
Clarke’s journey on Game of Thrones culminated in a similar conclusion. “I think ending it was just the mother of all releases,” she says over the phone. “It was just the metaphorical undoing of the bra, except it’s like a 10-year experience.”
Here, Clarke tells BAZAAR.com about repping Dolce & Gabbana’s new scent, saying goodbye to Khaleesi, and promoting gender equality.
Just when all my childhood dreams seemed to have come true, I nearly lost my mind and then my life. I’ve never told this story publicly, but now it’s time.
It was the beginning of 2011. I had just finished filming the first season of “Game of Thrones,” a new HBO series based on George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels. With almost no professional experience behind me, I’d been given the role of Daenerys Targaryen, also known as Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Lady of Dragonstone, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons. As a young princess, Daenerys is sold in marriage to a musclebound Dothraki warlord named Khal Drogo. It’s a long story—eight seasons long—but suffice to say that she grows in stature and in strength. She becomes a figure of power and self-possession. Before long, young girls would dress in platinum wigs and flowing robes to be Daenerys Targaryen for Halloween.
The show’s creators, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, have said that my character is a blend of Napoleon, Joan of Arc, and Lawrence of Arabia. And yet, in the weeks after we finished shooting the first season, despite all the looming excitement of a publicity campaign and the series première, I hardly felt like a conquering spirit. I was terrified. Terrified of the attention, terrified of a business I barely understood, terrified of trying to make good on the faith that the creators of “Thrones” had put in me. I felt, in every way, exposed. In the very first episode, I appeared naked, and, from that first press junket onward, I always got the same question: some variation of “You play such a strong woman, and yet you take off your clothes. Why?” In my head, I’d respond, “How many men do I need to kill to prove myself?”
To relieve the stress, I worked out with a trainer. I was a television actor now, after all, and that is what television actors do. We work out. On the morning of February 11, 2011, I was getting dressed in the locker room of a gym in Crouch End, North London, when I started to feel a bad headache coming on. I was so fatigued that I could barely put on my sneakers. When I started my workout, I had to force myself through the first few exercises.
“That lady” is Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, rightful heir to the Iron Throne, rightful Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, and Protector of the Seven Kingdoms, among other titles. She commands an air force of dragons, walks through fire, and is a serious contender to win the “Game of Thrones.”
The final season of the series, which begins next week on HBO, is the biggest TV show on Earth. It’s famous for killing off its lead characters, but (so far) Clarke’s has survived.
Correspondent Tracy Smith said, “Even though you are one of the obviously most powerful characters in the show, I don’t think audiences would be surprised if they killed you?”
“Well, this is the incredible writing, the incredible storytelling on the show,” Clarke said. “And in that way that life can be shocking and frightening and confusing, this show doesn’t shy away from that for the sake of storytelling. It embraces that.”
“So, without giving anything away, when you read that final script, what happens to Daenerys, what was your reaction?”
“It’s sort of almost impossible to answer that question.”
“Without giving something away?”
“Uh-huh. I have so much to say about that!”
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