Enchanting Emilia Clarke

May 22 2019

Emilia Clarke Feared Being Written Off ‘Game of Thrones’

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.

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May 21 2019

Emilia Clarke on Game of Thrones finale’s shock twist: ‘I stand by Daenerys’

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?’”

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May 19 2019

Emilia Clarke on Why Game of Thrones Is the Perfect Form of Escapism + HQ Scans

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.

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May 19 2019

Emilia Clarke Had an Interesting Strategy For Keeping Daenerys’s Fate a Secret

At this point, the Game of Thrones cast can be divided into two camps. Not good and evil; not Lannister and Stark; not Essos and Westeros. No, these days, the final season’s cast can be divided into who can and cannot keep a secret. In the latter camp, we have Sophie Turner, who “only told two people” about how Game of Thrones ends, including husband Joe Jonas; Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who told Busy Philipps, and Kit Harington, whose wife, former Game of Thrones actress Rose Leslie, refused to speak to him for three days after he spoiled the ending of the show.

And in the former camp, we have Maisie Williams, who said she would have to be “very drunk” to give away any secrets; Lena Headey, whose sequestration in a room in Belfast, despite all the wine, probably helped her keep any potential spoilers to herself, and Emilia Clarke, who, mostly nobly of all, knew about Daenerys’s heel-turn for a full two years before it finally aired and told no one.

“It was so hard to keep a secret,” Clarke told the Evening Standard during a red-carpet interview this week. “Every time someone would come up to me and say, ‘I love her!’ inside, I was thinking, ‘Well you’re not going to love her for long!’” (Of course, this doesn’t mean that Clarke didn’t tell anyone more privately, but still, she’s managed not to broadcast any theoretical breaches of any theoretical NDAs.) As a result, her face did a funny thing when she had to talk about Daenerys publicly: “I would just nod and smile, and that’s why I had this sort of furrowed-eyebrow expression a lot of the time. My eyebrows would sort of curl up,” she said. Sounds an awful lot like the face she made during Daenerys and Sansa Stark’s Season-8 tête-à-tête.

Still, Emilia Clarke will be there when all her friends do finally see how the show wraps up. “I’ve hired out a room to host a screening and there’s more than 40 people coming,” she said in the same interview. “We’ve had to get a load of bean bags in for the front row as so many people want to come.”

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April 07 2019

For Emilia Clarke, Ending Game of Thrones Was “the Metaphorical Undoing of the Bra”

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.

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