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?’”
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.
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.”
As promised I’ve been working on the Press Archive today and have added some new articles and a bunch of new video interviews. Keep checking back for more updates.
I’ve been working on the Press Archive for the past couple of days. It is now up and running with lots of Emilia news/interviews. I put a sticky on the most recent news so it’s on top. Mostly there are just interviews on there for now. I still have loads of articles and news to add. I’ll be working on that in the next few days. Please, go check it out.
