Emilia Clarke and Regina Hall spent the TV season playing characters who break through the boys’ club. Clarke, on HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” was Daenerys, the dragon queen whose will to power has brought her on an eight-season journey to the heart of the action in Westeros. Hall, a TV veteran, infiltrates a different center of power on Showtime’s comedy “Black Monday,” as the lone woman in a 1980s Wall Street firm.
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.
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.”
It has been confirmed that Emilia will be joining Game of Thrones co-stars John Bradley, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Peter Dinklage, Michelle Fairley, Kit Harington, Rose Leslie and Richard Madden at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. They will be participating in a panel on Friday July 19th at 2:50 p.m.-3:45 p.m. in Hall H.
Another new video from Comic-Con. This time from Time Warner Cable. Emilia and cast mates Richard Madden, Rose Leslie, Michelle Fairley, and Alfie Allen discuss the fan response to Game of Thrones season 2, the Fantasy genre, and season 3. Video below screencaps in the gallery.
If you type “Emilia Clarke” into the Google news feed you will find a plethora of recent stories about Emilia playing Anastasia Steele in the upcoming film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. With casting speculations reaching a fever pitch Emilia is getting even more buzz from the fans that before. I particularly like this post from Books & Review where they round up some of the recent Emilia/Ana news.
“Fifty Shades of Grey” fans are anxious to know who will play the two key roles of Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele in the steamy film adaption of bestselling author E.L. James’ novel.
The steamy “Fifty Shades” trilogy (“Fifty Shades Darker” and “Fifty Shades Freed”) tells the story of 22-year-old recent college grad Anastasia Steele, who enters into a dominant/submissive sexual relationship with 27-year old sexy billionaire Christian Grey, through an “agreement,” and both explore the world of BDSM (bondage, dominance, submission, masochism).
Recently, Emma Watson has been the frontrunner to play the role of Anastasia, but now it looks like she has competition with “Games of Throne” actress Emilia Clarke.
Clarke plays Daenerys Targaryen in “Game of Thrones.” TheStir.CafeMom.com said that casting Clarke would be a great idea:
“The 25-year-old actress, who’s a natural brunette, definitely has the right look. She’s both innocent and sweet yet has the potential to be extremely badass. And speaking of asses, she has absolutely no problem with nudity, as she had multiple sex scenes with her on-screen husband. Needless to say, her body is smokin’!”
The Stir also said that she is also a “fantastic actress.” Since the film adaption will need high quality actors to pull it off, Clarke can prove the one. Also, she’s far lesser known that other actresses.
Gather Entertainment also described Clarke as “intriguing” and that she might be a better fit for the role because of her experience with darker themes explored in “Games of Thrones.”
“The naturally brunette beauty has done nude scenes on the show; she’s the right age for the role; and her face seems perfect for the part – at times she can look a bit awkward and silly, but she can also look rather sensual. This ability is definitely going to be needed to play Anastasia Steele since her goofy inner goddess’ inner monologue contrasts so starkly with her steamy sex scenes with Christian Grey,” Gather Entertainment described.
It was recently reported that Watson was in talks for the role of Anastasia, but this has not yet been confirmed.
Other stars associated with the role are “Gilmore Girls” star Alexis Bledel, “Pretty Little Liars” star Lucy Hale, “The Vampire Diaries” star Nina Dobrev, “Gossip Girl” and “Melrose Place” star Katie Cassidy, “Twilight” star Kristen Stewart (even though it was confirmed she will not be playing the part) and “Ted” star Mila Kunis.
Variety reports that Claflin and Clarke are set to join director Antonio Negret’s (Transit) Overdrive, which starts filming in Marseilles this summer. The story, from Wanted scribes Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, follows two American brothers who take their penchant for grand theft auto overseas to France, where they run into trouble in the black market. Morel, who previously worked as a cinematographer on The Transporter movies, said:
“We’re going to do things that you’ve never seen actual cars do before on screen.”
Claflin was recently reported to be close to a deal to star in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Clarke can be seen in the hit HBO series Game of Thrones when it returns next spring.
