ET Canada – Emilia Clarke celebrated her 34th birthday in style Friday.
The actress shared a series of snaps from the most “exhilarating experience” of her life on Instagram, looking super happy in every photo.
Clarke, who played Mother Of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen on “Game of Thrones”, regularly took to the skies on the back of a dragon on the show, with her hashtagging her latest post: “Who says you can only fly dragons?”
She also asked in her caption, “What could match the profound existential terror of another birthday?”
The star was joined at the skydive centre by her mother Jennifer, who, it seems, did not jump with her.
One snap also showed Clarke holding up a “Well done you just jumped out of an aeroplane” certificate.
Clarke’s adrenalin-filled adventure comes after she developed a newfound “appreciation” for her loved ones amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Clarke joined Time magazine’s “TIME100 Talks” and opened up about what she has learned through quarantine and surviving two brain aneurysms.
“When you personally come very close to dying — which I did twice — it brings into light a conversation which you have with yourself which goes to the tune of: appreciation for the things you have in your life, thanks for the people who are here,” she explained.
Clarke added, “COVID has paradoxically been quite an incredible moment for us to really assess that properly and see: how are the ways, during a global pandemic, can we reach out and make people not feel alone?”
BUSTLE – Step aside, Mother of Dragons. As it turns out, actors Ryan Reynolds and Emilia Clarke have the same birthday — but the Deadpool actor isn’t keen on sharing it. Today, Oct. 23, Reynolds and The Game of Thrones star celebrate another trip around the sun. According to Reynolds, though, the day is feeling a bit cramped this year — so he made some adjustments.
It all started when Maximum Effort — Reynolds’ production company — poked fun at its owner on Twitter and wished Clarke a happy birthday. In response, the actor tweeted, “So sorry. I moved her birthday this year. It was feeling a little crowded for me.” Clarke, for her part, has not responded to the change of plans, but that might be because she’s been busy jumping out of planes.
So sorry. I moved her birthday this year. It was feeling a little crowded for me. https://t.co/Mx5CXPKH4T
— Ryan Reynolds (@VancityReynolds) October 23, 2020
Earlier today, Clarke shared on Instagram that she celebrated her birthday by going skydiving. “What could match the profound existential terror of another birthday?” she wrote alongside a series of photos that showed her checking into Hinton Skydiving Centre in England and wearing a full set of gear. “Jumping out of a goddamn plane is what,” she added.
There’s no telling if Reynolds also has plans to propel himself out of a plane today, but the sarcastic tweet comes after the Canadian actor revealed that he recently voted in his very first American election ahead of the presidential election on Nov. 3. Both Reynolds and wife Blake Lively documented the milestone with the same photos on their respective Instagram accounts. “This is my first time voting in America,” Reynolds captioned his post. “I’d like to thank my wife Blake for making my first time so gentle and loving. It was super scary at first, then exciting and now I’m a little tired. But proud.”
Lively echoed that it was Reynolds’ “first time” in her own Instagram post. “He was understandably scared,” she wrote. “It all happened so fast. Like, REALLY fast. He wept. I pretended to weep.”
Wait. Where is Adoring Emilia Clarke? When Nicole decided to close her account, I bought the domain so that is how you ended up here! I didn’t get her content so you’ll find different things on mine than what was on hers. Take a tour! And please come back very soon.
Hi! I’m AliKat and I’ll be your hostess webmistress. I used to run Game of Thrones Fan and other members of the cast but I’ve run this site for Emilia since 2016. Emilia is my queen, now and always. My other fansites are listed here if you wish to look – AliKatsKorner. I hope you enjoy the site and if you have any questions please let me know.
If you’re a regular visitor to Enchanting Emilia Clarke and are following us on Twitter at @EmiliaCentral, please follow us at @EmiliaClarkeNet instead.
SYFY – HBO’s Game of Thrones wasn’t your average fantasy epic. It was grim, dirty, violent, and sexual. In fact, it had such frequent and graphic nudity that it helped coin the phrase “sexposition” when referring to plot exposition being doled out by a nude character. But according to a new book, the experiences of the cast in these intimate scenes left plenty to be desired — especially in the hit show’s early, scrappy days.
James Hibberd’s new oral history Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series digs into this plenty, including interviews with everyone from Khal Drogo’s Jason Momoa to Cersei’s body double, Rebecca Van Cleave. Few were complementary to the series’ handling of its sex scenes, most of which took place long before HBO mandated hiring intimacy coordinators for all its shows in 2018.
Momoa took first-time showrunners D. B. Weiss and David Benioff’s unprofessional handling of the situations in stride, though he needed to sometimes refuse their requests. Momoa recalled a time while shooting a Season 1 sex scene when he placed the intimacy pouch (which covers an actor’s genitals in nude scenes) in Benioff’s hand: “That was because David had been like, ‘Momoa, just take it off!’ You know, giving me s***. ‘Sacrifice! Do it for your art!’ I’m just like, ‘F*** you, bro. My wife would be pissed. That’s for one lady only, man.'”
Momoa added: “So afterward I ripped the thing off and kept it in my hand and gave him a big hug and a handshake and was like, ‘Hey, now you have a little bit of me on you, buddy.'”
His scene partner, Daenerys Targaryen actress Emilia Clarke, has spoken at length about her uncomfortable experiences doing nudity on the show. “Because Jason had experience — he was an experienced actor who had done a bunch of stuff before coming on to this — he was like, ‘Sweetie, this is how it’s meant to be, this is how it’s not meant to be, and I’m going to make sure that that’s the f***ing gaze,’ Clarke said on the podcast Armchair Expert. “He was always like, ‘Can we get her a f***ing robe? She’s shivering!’ … He was so kind and considerate and cared about me as a human being.”
“I was so desperate to be the most professional actor I could be that I’d be like, ‘Yeah, sure,’ for anything they threw at me,” Clarke said in Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon. “I’ll just cry about it in the bathroom later, whatever, you won’t know.”
The actress, who appeared fully nude in sex scenes and when Daenerys is “reborn” in fire alongside her dragons, spoke about the pressures of being an actress fresh from drama school on that set. “Those were tough days,” she said of the first season, adding, “I’ve had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up.’”
Misleading promises from production reportedly ranged from people sneaking onto a closed set to a supposedly closed set being thrown wide open. Hodor actor Kristian Nairn remembered during his Season 1 nude scene (“probably the most traumatic day of my life,” he previously said), when a prosthetic was worn because there was a child in the scene. Alas, things did not go as planned.
“I was s*** scared, but I did it because of the whole body-positive thing — Game of Thrones has a lot of people of different shapes and sizes, probably more than any other show ever,” Nairn said. “It was a very busy day on set, which was the opposite of what they told me. I’ve never seen a busier set!”
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.
TIME – Emilia Clarke—known for displaying strength as Daenerys Targaryen and exuding warmth in movies like Last Christmas and Me Before You—is no stranger to hospitals and healthcare workers. After suffering two brain aneurysms starting in 2011, her road to recovery brought her to a deep appreciation for the care she received during her journey back to health—and to want to enable others with brain injuries to find similar resources, the actor shared in a TIME100 Talks that aired on Sept. 24.
Clarke’s own experiences have provided her with what she called an “armor of sorts” to face the pandemic. “When you personally come very close to dying—which I did twice—it brings into light a conversation which you have with yourself which goes to the tune of: appreciation for the things you have in your life, thanks for the people who are here,” she said.
SameYou, Clarke’s brain injury recovery charity, attempts to help serve that purpose. But like many other organizations this year, SameYou has felt the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“People with brain injuries were leaving hospital early,” she said. “My heart was bleeding for all the people who weren’t able to get what I was able to get.” Experimenting with new virtual ways to connect with brain injury patients has presented its own silver linings, however. “COVID has paradoxically been quite an incredible moment for us to really assess that properly and see: how are the ways, during a global pandemic, can we reach out and make people not feel alone?”
Clarke also discussed the “collective grief” she thinks we are all facing, and the empathy that it might engender. “What can come out of this is the knowledge that this stuff we place so much importance on the, the things, the materialistic things, take a backseat,” she said. “When you feel bad, when you feel low, when you feel sad, when you feel scared—I think there’s a societal setup for you to grab for more to fix it, to kind of cover it. When really what you need is to strip it back and be introspective and reflective where possible. That’s the thing that’s going to last you for the rest of your life.”
While Clarke’s on-camera work has been on hold, she’s stayed active reading poetry on her social media and participating in things like a theatrical table read of a play with her friend and colleague Emma Thompson, who also wrote her TIME100 tribute in 2019, with proceeds going to charity. And when it comes to returning to showbiz, Clarke—who has been vocal about the issues she faced on the Game of Thrones set—is optimistic about how the industry has changed. “There are [now] things like intimacy coaches, which is wonderful, and something that was very far away from my experience,” she said.
Lately, she’s particularly encouraged by movements toward representative storytelling. “Whose stories are we hearing? Who are we hearing? That’s vital. Inclusivity of humanity—of everybody—there’s not enough representation,” she said. “I believe it’s coming. That’s something I care about, and the way that audiences can support that is by watching things … and giving them big box office numbers. It’s a business.”
Expanding the breadth of stories we see on screen is good for everyone, she added: “The world will be richer for it.”
Clarke’s approach right now is earnest hope. “I just keep saying the cheesiest things, but I believe in humanity, I believe in us. It’s chilling that it takes a global pandemic to make a bunch of us stop and assess and see what we have. But I’m hopeful that our healthcare workers and our frontline workers are going to be supported forever,” she said. “I’m hopeful that in the wake of Black Lives Matter and everything that’s happened around that, we will continue to see stories from everyone. I’m hopeful that when we’re not fighting a virus that doesn’t care where you come from or how much money you have, we’ll still say, ‘Oh, we’re on the same side!’”
