After graduating from Drama Centre London, British actress Emilia Clarke made her debut as a professional actress in the 2009 British soap opera, Doctors. Her third professional role was as Daenerys Targaryen in the HBO drama series Game of Thrones, based on George R. R. Martin’s fantasy novel series, A Song of Ice and Fire.
Tamzin Merchant was the actress originally cast as the character of Daenerys, but the role went to Clarke when the pilot episode was reshot in early 2010 (via Yahoo). The role quickly catapulted her to global fame. Here dedication to the character can be deduced from the fact that even death did not scare her.
Emilia Clarke Revealed Her Biggest Fear
Emilia Clarke appears as Daenerys Targaryen in all eight seasons of Game of Thrones aired between April 2011 and May 2019. Daenerys and her brother Viserys were the last living members of House Targaryen, which had ruled the Iron Throne for 300 years before being exiled.
In the first season of the show, in exchange for military support to reclaim the Iron Throne, Viserys marries Daenerys to the Dothraki warlord Khal Drogo, which makes her Khaleesi.
According to Harper’s Bazaar, tragedy struck when the Me Before You actress had a subarachnoid hemorrhage, bleeding around the brain, shortly after she was done filming this season. The immediate mortality rate of patients with such conditions is high, but it was not death that scared the actress. Speaking to the outlet, she said:
“I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was afraid of being fired! I decided: ‘This is not something that’s going to define me’. I never gave into any feeling of ‘Why me? This sucks’. I was just like – gotta get back on it.”
Luckily, Clarke survived the hemorrhage and continued to star as Daenerys in Game of Thrones. Many did not know of this health scare until 2019 when she publicly spoke about it.
Emilia Clarke Almost Lost Her Will to Live
Emilia Clarke defeated the life-threatening hemorrhage twice. Two years after surviving the first, while she was preparing her Broadway debut as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, another hemorrhage struck. To make matters worse, a routine operation to address the bleeding went wrong.
The impact of this operation on Clarke was straight out of a performer’s nightmare as the actress experienced aphasia – a disorder that impacts a person’s ability to speak. Consequently, not only she was in unbearable pain but also could not form lucid sentences, and phrases that came out of her mouth did not make sense.
At times, things would get too bad and that is when the Terminator Genisys actress would have untoward thoughts. In an article she wrote (via Harper’s Bazaar):
“In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug. I asked the medical staff to let me die. My job – my entire dream of what life would be – centred on language, on communication. Without it, I was lost.”
The actress also told the outlet that after the second hemorrhage, her worries about her job security had increased because she felt that the producers would find her “unreliable”. Despite all this, she braved her challenges and became one of the most beloved Game of Thrones characters.
Game of Thrones is available for streaming on Netflix.
