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.
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.
WINTER IS COMING – Earlier this week, Emilia Clarke appeared on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman. The episode, which you can listen to here, is quite long: over two hours! Clarke covers a huge variety of topics, from why she started her SameYou charity to growing up in England to which American accent she finds sexy to, of course, Game of Thrones.
In fact, she talks rather a lot about Thrones, because Shapard is clearly a superfan and has a ton of questions. Like, it’s hard to overstate how big a fan he is.
Anyway, Clarke covers a lot of ground, but I was most interested in her comments about why Daenerys chose to burn down the city of King’s Landing after it was clear the Lannister army had surrendered. She walked Shepard and Padman through her thought process after receiving those final scripts. “On one side, I was like, ‘How juicy!’ Oh my days, as an actress, to be able to do this? Like, flip that fucking shit? And on the other side, I’m like, ‘It hurts. It hurts so much. I love her so much.’ So it was kind of a combination of that the entire way through. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to film.”
Clarke, who was terrific in that scene, clearly spent a lot of time getting herself to a place where she could play in convincingly. She offered up a passionate explanation for why Daenerys did what she did. “[I]f you really look at her…the fact that she’s been on the run her whole life, she’s been abused her whole life, she’s been dealing with the weight of responsibility of carrying her family’s legacy her whole life…When it comes down to this thing of people start to betray her, people start to leave her, people start to devalue what it is she’s made…She’s killed people all the way up until this point, and now someone’s gonna turn around and say, ‘Ah, maybe no.’ I did this because it was all or nothing. I went all in, and now you’re telling me that I can’t? So it becomes its own addiction.”
You’re at the bar, and you’re holding the fucking drink in your hand, and you don’t wanna fucking drink it, but you can’t help it, because you’re so damaged and you’re so hurt and you’re so vulnerable that there is nothing left to do. Everybody has left you. That’s my pitch.
Like a lot of other fans, I didn’t quite buy Daenerys’ flip to the dark side when it happened, but I never doubted Clarke’s commitment, and honestly, she’s kind of selling me on it here.
VARIETY – Emilia Clarke revealed that she’s been pressured to do nude scenes on projects following her role as the occasionally nude Daenerys Targaryen on “Game of Thrones.” Now a seasoned actor, Clarke is quick to shut down producers who won’t respect her boundaries.
“I’m a lot savvier with what I’m comfortable with, and what I am okay with doing,” Clarke said in a recent episode of Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast. “I’ve had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up,’ and they’re like, ‘You don’t wanna disappoint your ‘Game of Thrones’ fans.’ And I’m like, ‘F–you.’ I feel like I’ve seen enough now to know what is actually needed.”
Clarke recalled filming intimate scenes on the “Game of Thrones” set, revealing that she found nude scenes “terrifying.” She explained how former co-star Jason Momoa acted as her mentor during the filming of Season 1.
“It’s only now that I realize how fortunate I was with that, because that could have gone many, many, many different ways. Because Jason had experience, he had done a bunch of stuff before coming on to this, he was like, ‘Sweetie, this is how it’s meant to be and this is how it’s not meant to be, and I’m going to make sure that’s the way it goes,’” Clarke said, adding that Momoa would always be sure she received a robe during the filming of nude scenes. “He was so kind and considerate and cared about me as a human being. He took care of me, he really did. In an environment where I didn’t know I needed to be taken care of.”
Clarke, who was on “Game of Thrones” for 10 years, explained how she felt first receiving the role and learning how much nudity was expected of her.
“I’d come fresh from drama school, and I was like, ‘Approach this as a job.’ If it’s in the script then it’s clearly needed, this is what this is and I’m gonna make sense of it,” Clarke said. “I’m floating through this first season and I have no idea what I’m doing, I have no idea what any of this is. I’ve never been on a film set like this before, I’d been on a film set twice before then, and I’m now on a film set completely naked with all of these people, and I don’t know what I’m meant to do and I don’t know what’s expected of me.”
With Momoa’s guidance, Clarke felt comfortable pushing back, even requesting less nudity after Season 1.
Outside of the Emmy-winning series, Clarke has appeared in “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” “Me Before You” and “Last Christmas,” which is currently in theaters.
Sadly Emilia didn’t win a much deserved Emmy for Best Actress in a Drama, “Game of Thrones” had 10 wins at the Creative Arts Emmy that was last Sunday. Last night they won the all important Outstanding Drama Series. Also, Peter Dinklage won his fourth Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series.
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- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Poster
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Promotional Art
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Episode Stills > 8×01 – “Winterfell”
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Episode Stills > 8×02 – “A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms”
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Episode Stills > 8×03 – “The Long Night”
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Episode Stills > 8×06 – “The Iron Throne”
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Extras Screencaps > The Cast Remembers – Emilia Clarke
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Extras Screencaps > The Game Revealed – 8.01 “Winterfell”
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Extras Screencaps > The Game Revealed – 8.02 “A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms”
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Extras Screencaps > The Game Revealed – 8.03 “The Long Night”
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Extras Screencaps > The Game Revealed – 8.04 “The Last Of The Starks”
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Extras Screencaps > The Game Revealed – 8.05 “The Bells”
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?’”
Gallery Links:
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Episode Stills > 8×06 – “The Iron Throne”
- GAME OF THRONES > Season 8 > Episode Screencaps > 8×06 – “The Iron Throne”
