Enchanting Emilia Clarke

February 08 2018

Press: Emilia Clarke says her Star Wars femme fatale ‘has a core of steel’

EW – Game of Thrones fans know her as Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, rightful heir to the Iron Throne, rightful Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Protector of the Seven Kingdoms, the Mother of Dragons, the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Unburnt, the Breaker of Chains.

Star Wars fans will come to know Emilia Clarke only as: Qi’ra.

This is a character who doesn’t want her full resume out there. She’s a woman of shadows, of secrecy. She’s a woman of many identities, the truest ones hidden away and only visible to those she trusts, which may be no one.

She’s also one of the primary forces that shape the young smuggler we meet in Solo: A Star Wars Story.

As part of Entertainment Weekly’s cover story about the May 25 movie, we caught up with Clarke to discuss what we need to know about this galactic femme fatale.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Are you currently shooting the final season of Game of Thrones?

EMILIA CLARKE: Technically I am currently shooting Game of Thrones. But right now I am in Rome shooting a D&G campaign. So sort of a mixture of the two.

Sounds like a busy time, so thanks for talking to me about Qi’ra. She and Han Solo go back to their childhoods, so can you characterize the setup of their relationship?

Well, they grew up as comrades, essentially. They grew up as pals, as partners in crime. There is obviously the romantic side of things. But they grew up together. So they were kids together. And the beautiful thing about this Han Solo story is it’s highlighting all of the most brilliant aspects of Han Solo the character and characterizing those aspects in characters that he meets on his journey to becoming who he is.

These people all represent different sides of who he becomes?

That’s kind of the story, really. You are seeing all of these different elements that make up who he is through the people and the interactions and the relationships just as we all do as human beings. We are simply the embodiment of our experiences, essentially.

They’re guiding him, inspiring him. Maybe corrupting him?

You see the beginnings of him, this loveable rogue. You get it fine-tuned throughout these relationships, and Qi’ra is one of those relationships that has an impact on him as a character. I mean, hopefully [laughs] — if I have done my job. And within that relationship, the thing that that you see with Qi’ra is that she an enigma.

So through her, he learns not to show his cards to people.

She is a little bit of a tough one to get a hold of, really. There is this underlying joy in an origin story because you know where they end up. And Qi’ra is nowhere to be seen, so … something has happened! [Laughs] You know what I mean?

The film will give us a reason why he doesn’t talk about her?
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December 17 2017

Press: Emilia Clarke on Game of Thrones fans: ‘Airports are a source of fear. It gets kind of freaky’

THE TELEGRAPH – Emilia Clarke walks into a suite at Claridge’s, a gaggle of publicists and agents surrounding her, with the kind of poise that you would expect from a queen.

To the tens of millions of fans of Game of Thrones, the show that catapulted her to fame only a year out of drama school, it’s a not unfamiliar scene.

Although of course, as Daenerys Targaryen, the all-powerful, slave-freeing queen of the show, it would be some kind of windswept castle or ancient pyramid, and her retinue would be in armour.

Even her newly blonde hair is apt (until now she’s worn a wig on the show). Like the character she plays, Emilia’s is a story of success against the odds (of which more later), but there the similarities end.

At 31, the English rose couldn’t be less like the prickly queen she plays (full title: Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, rightful heir to the Iron Throne, rightful Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Protector of the Seven Kingdoms, the Mother of Dragons, the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Unburnt, the Breaker of Chains… or just Dany for short).

Emilia is funny, light-hearted and, that entrance aside, a million miles from grand. She’s much more like the carefree, dancing girl she plays in the new campaign for the Dolce & Gabbana fragrance The One. (When the brand asked if she would be its new face, ‘I was like, “Well, yeah. Duh.”’)

In the past, Emilia has had to deal with uncomfortable questions about how she, as a woman, justified the arguably gratuitous female nudity and gruesome violence for which Game of Thrones initially made headlines.

But long before the Harvey Weinstein scandal turned Hollywood upside down, the show’s plot pulled a complete 180 – and now it’s the female characters who are fighting over the titular thrones. And everyone, but everyone, is rooting for the 5ft 2in Khaleesi, who is proving to be just as fierce as her dragons.

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November 21 2017

Press/Photos: Harper’s Bazaar – Emilia Clarke in Bloom

Harper’s Bazaar: The ‘Game of Thrones’ star stuns as BAZAAR’s December/January covergirl.

“It’s this epic story: My grandmother was colonial Indian, and it was a big old family secret because her mum had an affair with someone in India,” says the English rose Emilia Clarke. “She would wear makeup to make her skin look white.” Granny passed away when Clarke was 16, and the teenager took off for India with her boyfriend to scatter the ashes. “She loved India more than she loved England,” Clarke says. “Fuck, yeah. I love that part of me—I’m like one-eighth Indian.”

Nationality is a fluid concept for the actress who speaks the fictional Dothraki language in Game of Thrones, played the flighty New Yorker Holly Golightly in Broadway’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and broke hearts as the working-class Brit Louisa in Me Before You. And now Dolce & Gabbana has her speaking Italian as the new face of its fragrance the One. Her first ad campaign for the house captures Clarke returning home to her imaginary Neapolitan family and enough pasta to feed a Targaryen army. And, mamma mia, does she love Italians. “People in Italy let you know how they feel,” she says. “I like that I don’t need to guess. There’s something so addictive about their personalities.”

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August 30 2017

Press: “Game of Thrones” stars react to that huge Jon Snow reveal

EW – So. Emilia Clarke. How do you think Daenerys Targaryen is going to react in the final season of Game of Thrones to the rather stunning news that her lover Jon Snow is also her nephew?

We asked the Game of Thrones star this question while she sat on folding chair amid the ancient Roman ruins of Italica outside Seville, Spain last fall. The production used the historical location for King’s Landing’s famed Dragonpit in Sunday’s emotional finale, “The Dragon and the Wolf.”

Clarke paused, considering. Then she loudly cried: “Ewwwww!” and laughed. “I think that’s how it’s going to go. I get the toothbrush–” she pretended to frantically brush her tongue.

It was a hilarious reaction that underscores the rather seriously emotional game-changing revelation that threatens to shake up the final season of Game of Thrones.

I pointed out that Daenerys has presumably long assumed she’ll avoid her family’s long predilection for incest. “Exactly!” Clarke says. “And then I walked back into it.”

And what about the fact that Jon Snow — er, Aegon Targaryen — has a better claim to the Iron Throne than she does?

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July 11 2017

Press: How Emilia Clarke Took Khaleesi From Alt-Medieval Virgin to Feminist Icon

ELLE – The Game of Thrones star is ELLE’s August 2017 cover girl.

In Game of Thrones’s Daenerys Targaryen, Emilia Clarke has created one of the strongest, most enduring female characters in our pop-culture consciousness. So where does all that fire come from? Joseph Hooper explores this, as well as Clarke’s stance on motherhood, sex scenes, and life after GoT in ELLE’s exclusive interview in the August issue, on newsstands July 18.

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