VARIETY – Golden Globe-winning actor Hugh Laurie (“House”) and “Game of Thrones” actor Emilia Clarke will be part of the voice cast for animated feature “The Amazing Maurice.”
The voice cast also includes David Thewlis (“Wonder Woman”), Himesh Patel (“Yesterday”), Gemma Arterton (“Vita & Virginia”) and Hugh Bonneville (“Downton Abbey”). Toby Genkel (“Two by Two: Overboard!”) and Florian Westermann (“Little Dodo”) will co-direct.
The film will be an adaptation of bestselling author, the late Terry Pratchett’s 2001 book “The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents,” which is part of his iconic Discworld series. The book is a take on the popular folk tale about the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It won the Carnegie medal that recognizes the best children’s book in the U.K.
The story follows a streetwise ginger cat who has the perfect money-making scam. He finds a kid who plays a pipe, and also befriends his very own horde of talking rats. When they reach the stricken town of Bad Blintz, their con game goes awry.
The charity reading will take place on Sunday 25 October
WHAT’S ON STAGE – A virtual reading of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound will take place via Zoom at 7pm on 25 October.
Jonathan Church will direct Sanjeev Bhaskar (Magnus), Samantha Bond (Cynthia), Simon Callow (Moon), Emilia Clarke (Felicity), Freddie Fox (Simon), Derek Jacobi (Birdboot), Jennifer Saunders (Mrs Drudge) and Gary Wilmot (Hound) in the production, which is narrated by Robert Lindsay.
Stoppard’s farce, which first premiered in 1968 with a cast including the likes of Richard Briers and Ronnie Barker, parodies the Agatha Christie thrillers.
The show won’t be recorded or repeated, with all proceeds from tickets (costing £35) going to the Royal Theatrical Fund. A previous reading of Private Lives raised more than £44,000 earlier this year.
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.
While the casting is not yet a done deal, Clarke is the main actress in talks for the role of the iconic DC magician. Our sources say talks are far along enough that concept art has already been worked on with Clarke as the character. This would make her the first name attached to Bad Robot‘s universe of Justice League Dark films and series coming to HBO Max in the near future.
Clarke has been a fan favorite for a DC role for quite some time, so it seemed inevitable that a DC property would eye her for a project. It is currently unknown if Zatanna will have her own solo standalone film or series on the streaming platform, though she would, of course, appear with a host of JLD characters, such as John Constantine, Deadman, and Etrigan the Demon.
Stay tuned to The Cultured Nerd for more on this news as it develops.
I found this on BOUNDING INTO COMICS –
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WINTER IS COMING: Emilia Clarke made her West End debut in a production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Playhouse Theater in London. Reviews have yet to come out, but we do have images from opening night, which looks like it was a big success!
Clarke plays Nina, a young woman desperate to become an actress so she can escape an isolated life in the Russian countryside. She gets her shot courtesy of Konstantin (Daniel Monks), a young playwright and the son of a famous actor, played by fellow Game of Thrones veteran Indira Varma (Ellaria Sand). Another major character is the middlebrow writer Boris Trigorin (Tom Rhys Harries). The subtext-rich play explores the romantic and artistic relationships between these characters and is considered one of Chekhov’s major works. It’s legit stuff.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Clarke and company can’t have fun with it. Below, they chat about what it’s like working with director Jamie Lloyd:
Unfortunately due to the COVID19 pandemic, the play has been postponed. I will post once it resumes! Here are some photos from her first performance and also from rehearsal.
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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.
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.
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FILM PRODUCTIONS > Murder Manual > Stills
FILM PRODUCTIONS > Murder Manual > Trailer
FILM PRODUCTIONS > Murder Manual > Movie Screencaps
