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TIME – Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke thinks she has chemistry with the dragon she rides — even though in real life it’s a bright-green rig, a bit like a mechanical bull, that moves like the fictional, animated creature. Clarke explains their bond: “ You get a romantic couple onscreen, and chances are they’ve had sex… Half of that reason is that as an actor, you’re convincing yourself you’re in love with that person.”
Or that creature. Clarke’s bond with her beasts has helped Thrones soar — and helped her transcend jitters on her first major acting job. “I’m 5-ft.-nothing, I’m a little girl,” she says. “I’ve got the face of a chubby six-year-old. You walk onto set and you’re like, ‘Hey guys, I hope you like me! How can I help? What can I do? How can I be helpful?'” Perched on the dragon and empowered to “go crazy,” she says, her insecurities fall away: ” Hey, everybody! Now who’s shorty?! ”
Clarke spoke to TIME in January for our cover story on Game of Thrones, whose seventh season premieres July 16. Here’s an edited transcript of that conversation.
You joined the Game of Thrones cast fresh out of drama school — this is one of your very first jobs. When you walked onto the set and saw the enormous apparatus in place, what went through your mind?
Fear! I was just petrified! I genuinely was so scared — I was so fresh out, a year and a bit, so I’d done a couple of little things, but this was the first proper thing that I’d ever done. I was just thinking at any moment they would fire me, and at any moment they’d be like, Just joking, take the wig off.
The entire first-season arc begins with you living in fear and ends with you striding out of the fire, reborn. Do you feel as though, similarly, you’ve come into your own as an actress?
TIME – The battle for Westeros may be won or lost on the back of a lime green mechanical bull.
That’s what it looks like on a January Monday in Belfast, as Game of Thrones films its seventh season here. Certainly no one believes the dragons that have thrilled viewers of HBO’s hit series exist in any real sense. And yet it’s still somewhat surprising to see the British actor Emilia Clarke, who plays exiled queen Daenerys, straddling the “buck” on a soundstage at Titanic Studios, a film complex named after this city’s other famously massive export.
The machine under Clarke looks like a big pommel horse and moves in sync with a computer animation of what will become a dragon. Clarke doesn’t talk much between takes. Over and over, a wind gun blasts her with just enough force to make me worry about the integrity of her ash blond wig. (Its particular color is the result of 2½ months’ worth of testing and seven prototypes, according to the show’s hair designer.) Over and over, Clarke stares down at a masking-tape mark on the floor the instant episode director Alan Taylor shouts, “Now!” Nearby, several visual-effects supervisors watch on monitors.
How HBO’s insanely popular hit show turned a young British actress into a feminist, a fantasy icon and a royal fan favorite
ROLLING STONE – On a recent Monday afternoon, the queen was taking her tea. “Could I just be more English than sense itself and get an Earl Grey?” asks Emilia Clarke from the deep folds of a leather chesterfield sofa in the so-called Drawing Room of her downtown Manhattan hotel. The young waiter is only too happy to oblige, though it’s unclear whether he knows he’s in the presence of the Khaleesi, Mother of Dragons and rightful ruler of the Seven Kingdoms.
That being said, six seasons into HBO’s Game of Thrones – a cultural phenomenon that plays in no fewer than 170 countries, has inspired countless tattoos and baby namings, and has proved to be the network’s most popular show of all time, with a seventh season set to premiere July 16th – it’s more than likely that he does. Clarke smiles and tucks her feet up under her. “I’m crap at getting recognized,” she confides. “People are like, ‘Oh, hey!’ And I’m like” – she starts yelling – “‘God! Oh, hi! I’m sorry!’ ”
When I first met Clarke, back in 2013, the actress was 26, still relatively unknown when not wearing her signature GoT blond wig, and not likely to compare herself to her warrior-queen character. She’d still seemed slightly in awe of the fact that she’d gotten the job at all, which was only her third acting role ever. “I’m all too painfully aware of how quickly this can disappear,” she’d told me when we’d met in a Broadway dressing room, where she was rehearsing to play Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Four years later, Clarke has maintained her hallmarks – wry humor and ample good will, among them – but it’s clear we’re in another realm. Even in a messy bun and frayed blue jeans, she now comes across as a sort of beacon – poised, almost glowing, a point to which all other attention can’t help but be drawn. In other words, she has a way of commanding the room that seems downright Khaleesi-esque. She has, after all, now spent the bulk of her adult life embodying one of our culture’s most striking images of female domination, while eloquently explaining her onscreen nudity in broadly feminist terms. She’s turned 30 (of which she says, “I was just quietly panicking”). She’s graced the big screen multiple times, including opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator Genisys. And, like the rest of us, she’s lived through Brexit and the ascendency of Trump, or, as she puts it, “ ’16. The fucking year where everything shit happened.” So, times have changed – for better and for worse.
“You can’t expect everyone to just stop doing their jobs and march every day of their lives,” she says of the volatile political climate. “But we’ve got to be in this shit for the long game.” And for Clarke, being “in this shit” means not being OK with a lot of what goes on around her – a realization that grew and amplified “in a [post-Brexit] era where you suddenly go, ‘What do you mean my views are so vastly different from my neighbor?’ ” Like, for example, her views on being one of the few women on any given set. Or the fact that women consistently have fewer lines than their male counterparts, even when they’re playing the “lead.” Or that actresses must arrive for hair and makeup hours before most of the male stars.
While it’s a pleasure to talk to Emilia Clarke, you just know there are certain things she can’t reveal — like what will happen on the seventh season of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” that’s arriving in July, or anything about the plot of the Han Solo movie she is filming for Disney, which is set for a holiday release next year.
But she can deftly segue into discussing her career ambitions and the other films she’s in, such as “Voice From the Stone,” an indie she made two years ago that opens Friday.
“I first read the script five years ago, and I absolutely fell in love with it,” Clarke says. “I’m a sucker for a good script, because I’m an avid reader.”
Set in 1950s Tuscany, the film stars Clarke as a children’s nurse named Verena, who has been hired by Klaus (Marton Csokas), the artist father of a boy, Jakob (Edward Georg Dring), who hasn’t spoken since his mother died some seven months earlier.
So she moves in with the family at their eerie centuries-old castle. What the father didn’t tell her was that Jakob believes his mother speaks to him through the stone in the estate’s walls.
“I thought it had a Hitchcock-esque, ‘Rebecca’ quality to it that simmered,” Clarke says.
