The morning after the 2019 Emmy Awards, Emilia Clarke woke up with a goal: to redefine what she saw as success.
By any measure Clarke was already wildly successful. As well as starring in big-budget “Terminator” and “Star Wars” spinoffs, she was the de facto queen of premium drama, thanks to her portrayal of warrior princess Daenerys Targaryen in HBO’s blockbuster fantasy series “Game of Thrones.” With her gutsy disposition and ice-blond braids, the Mother of Dragons became a byword for female empowerment, not to mention a costume party staple (both Madonna and Khloe Kardashian have donned the Daenerys getup).
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But the movies — 2015’s “Terminator Genisys” and 2018’s “Solo: A Star Wars Movie” —underperformed. Then, in May 2019, “Game of Thrones” came to an abrupt and almost universally hated end: Mad with power, Daenerys is fatally betrayed by her lover-slash-nephew Jon Snow (Kit Harington) just as the long-coveted Iron Throne is finally within her grasp. Fans who’d been rooting for “Dany” for eight long years were furious. Even Clarke admits she was “absolutely livid” about the manner of her demise.
Still, four months later, she was at the Emmys, her first time in the running for lead actress in a drama, having previously scored three nominations in the supporting category. While “Game of Thrones” ended on a downer (although it still holds the record for most-watched season of any series in HBO’s history), winning would be a way to close that chapter on a victorious note. But on the night, Jodie Comer took home the award for “Killing Eve.” Clarke was crushed.
“I’m embarrassed to admit that not winning an Emmy was a really significant thing,” she says when we meet at the Hotel Café Royal in London one April afternoon. She recalls looking around the Microsoft Theater in downtown Los Angeles and thinking, “Everyone’s over ‘Game of Thrones’ now — you’re old news.” Tired and sad, she skipped the after-parties and went home.
The next morning, Clarke vowed never to “behave that way again.” “I do not like that person,” she thought, reproaching herself. The solution, she decided, was to redefine success. “Because clearly,” she says with a self-deprecating laugh, “I have a 13-year-old’s idea of success.”
Clarke was born to entertain. Even against the backdrop of a dreary hotel conference room, swaddled in a cozy cream sweater, she is riotous company, with a delightful habit of imitating voices as she recounts conversations, whether it’s her best friend, writer Lola Frears, or Drake Doremus, the director of her upcoming indie feature “Next Life,” or even Arnold Schwarzenegger, her co-star in “Terminator Genisys,” who she reveals took her to see the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea during their press tour. (“I was like, ‘I don’t think we need to get it for Snapchat, babe. I think we’re good.’”)
But Clarke nearly didn’t go to drama school, having spent two years applying, without success, to institutions such as the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She was only offered a place at Drama Centre London when another student dropped out at the last minute. Her path to “Game of Thrones” was equally fortuitous. Famously, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss shot a pilot (with Tamzin Merchant as Daenerys) but, after disastrous notes from HBO, jettisoned most of it and recast several roles. Clarke was working at the London Film Museum when her agent called. She ran to the bathroom to answer her phone.
“I was like” — she affects a stage whisper — “‘Hello?’ And he said, ‘You ever audition for “Game of Thrones?”’ I was like, ‘You’ve just said gobbledygook. I have no idea what we’re talking about.’” After multiple rounds of auditions in London and L.A., Daenerys was hers.
Initially, Clarke was ecstatic (“I genuinely had three weeks of parties”), but during a preproduction vacation with her parents, she read her scenes for the first time. “I just cried with fear,” she recalls. Daenerys’ first few minutes of screen time involve disrobing before being fondled by her on-screen brother as he discloses his plan to marry her off to a nomadic tribe of warriors. “Can you imagine the terror?” she asks.
Clarke is at pains to clarify that she didn’t experience any “bad stuff” during “Game of Thrones,” more a general insensitivity to how a 23-year-old might feel standing nude in a room full of strangers. “Because I know what it can be” — she’s talking about the “bad stuff” — “and on ‘Game of Thrones’ I never had that,” Clarke explains. Does that mean she encountered it elsewhere? “I’ve experienced lack of care on other jobs,” she replies, “which I think could have been prevented with some consideration.”
When I probe whether she’s talking about either “Terminator Genisys” or “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” both of which had troubled productions, it’s the only time during our conversation Clarke politely declines to answer. “I don’t want to specifically say,” she says. “There’s just been a number of occasions where I’ve been like, ‘This ain’t right.’ And again, it’s not through someone abusing power; it’s through lack of thinking and care.”
(By contrast, the sex scene in Clarke’s upcoming Prime Video series “Criminal” was a dream. “I walked onto that set and saw the way that [director] Dee Rees was behaving, and I went to the loo and wept for my younger self, who did not get that.”)
Zoe McConnell for Variety
“Game of Thrones” became a cultural phenomenon, upending the lives of its cast in more ways than one. For starters, there was the financial security, which enabled Clarke to pay off her parents’ mortgage. (She says the main cast’s reported salary of $300,000 per episode was wildly exaggerated. “We didn’t earn that much. Can you imagine? I’d have been driving a couple of Porsches!”) And, of course, there was the global fame, which frightened and puzzled her. “I spent a lot of time trying to understand it,” she says. “And then you realize it’s just a formula: The less you’re on TV, the less famous you are. It comes and it goes.”
Unbeknownst to the world, other seismic shifts were also taking place in Clarke’s life, or more specifically, her head. Not long after wrapping on the first season of “Game of Thrones,” Clarke collapsed at the gym; she’d had a brain hemorrhage, which required immediate hospitalization and emergency surgery. She suffered another hemorrhage after Season 3. Clarke didn’t go public with her condition until 2019, when she launched SameYou, a brain injury charity that helps with all aspects of recovery. That’s because, as well as the many physical effects of brain injuries, ranging from fatigue to loss of mobility, there is often survivor’s guilt, she explains. “For a number of years, I felt that I had cheated death, and it was coming to get me,” Clarke says. “I truly felt like I had done something wrong, and I shouldn’t be here.” She adds: “I also thought it ruined my ability to act — which some people might agree with!” Clarke cackles.
There was further heartbreak when her father died from cancer after Season 7, just as the frenzy around “Game of Thrones” was growing to the point that Clarke was scared to leave the house. Then came that controversial series finale, the Emmys and the pandemic, which shut down the industry. “The most extreme versions of life happened in that 10-year period,” she reflects.
Outside the show, there were forays into other franchises, concluding with the fast-forgotten Marvel series “Secret Invasion” in 2022. Clarke is under no illusion about how those projects were received. Of “Secret Invasion,” she says in a goofy voice, “I don’t think no one liked that show, guys. I’m sorry!” She continues: “‘Star Wars’? They didn’t like it. ‘Terminator’? That should never have happened. But these were jobs I said yes to, you know what I mean?”
Were the frosty receptions disappointing? “I entered into already existing franchises,” she says, “so when they don’t work out, it’s not personal.”
Which brings us back to redefining success. The first step was to say “no” more often. “I said no to a lot,” she recalls. “I need to wait for the right thing.”
But eventually she realized the perfect job — just like the perfect house or the perfect man — might not exist, so she may as well have fun. Which leads to the second step of redefining success: taking on a role “for no other reason than that I would enjoy that job,” she says. “My connection to a project ends when they say, ‘Picture wrap.’ Because it’s not for me to decide what people will think of it.”
In that vein comes “Next Life,” a “Sliding Doors”-like romantic drama made on a shoestring budget; in it, she plays two versions of an aspiring jazz singer named Ivy. The film premieres at the Tribeca Festival next month. “This was one of the first times since making my decision about success that I realized how profoundly true that was,” she says of enjoying the process. As soon as it wrapped, she let go of any potential anxiety about its reception. “I need nothing from it,” Clarke explains. “It’s given me everything I ever needed, including a real friendship circle.” She and Doremus even got matching ivy tattoos, which she enthusiastically shows me, rolling up the left sleeve of her sweater.
After that, there’s “Criminal,” in which she plays an armed robber called Mallory, whom she gleefully describes as “all tits and gold chains.” Meanwhile Bea, her character in recently released Peacock series “Ponies,” is the straight-edge wife of a CIA agent who sets out to investigate her husband’s mysterious death in Soviet-era Russia.
“It was such a joy to read,” she says of “Ponies.” “Quite often, I’ll get scripts where I’ll go, ‘Can’t wait to watch it; don’t want to be in it.’ That was not this.”
As well as taking on the lead role (opposite Haley Lu Richardson), Clarke also boarded as a producer. Season 1 ended on a cliffhanger, and the “Ponies” team is hoping to get the greenlight for a second season order any day now. There have been “many discussions” about where the show might go next. “I’m very fortunate to be an actual producer, so I get to be a part of these conversations,” Clarke says.
It’s an opportunity she didn’t get on “Game of Thrones.” “Aside from what I brought as an actor, I didn’t have any creative input, nor did I want any,” Clarke says. Not that she’s salty about it: She calls Benioff and Weiss “geniuses” while dismissing her younger self as “not qualified.”
Despite that, could she have persuaded the duo to change Daenerys’ fate? Clarke, who looks horrified at the thought, interjects before I can even finish the sentence. “No,” she replies, explaining that Benioff and Weiss were “fastidious about us saying the lines exactly as they’ve written them” — to the point that if she said “it’s” instead of “it is,” they’d ask her to go again. All of which meant that while it was Clarke who brought Daenerys to life over eight years, she never felt like she had a hand in developing her.
“I was given the seasons, and I, to the best of my ability, empathized and understood and tracked every choice she made so it felt like mine,” she says. “I felt like that was what my job was.”
Unquestionably, she succeeded, turning the Mother of Dragons into a bona fide pop culture icon in the process. But it’s only now, with the benefit of hindsight, that Clarke can fully appreciate the experience. “I have gone through every circuitous route to get to the place that I am now, which is finally being able to be very grateful for everything that ‘Game of Thrones’ did and has given me. I no longer feel trapped in it, or trapped in the result of being in it,” she says thoughtfully. “I feel just really lucky that it happened to me — even luckier that I’ve had time to understand what that was, and now I feel firmly on the other side.”
Charity Spotlight: SameYou
Emilia Clarke experienced not one but two brain hemorrhages while playing the Mother of Dragons in “Game of Thrones.” At the time, “I was lost in a sea of ‘What next?’ when it came to my recovery and aftercare of a brain injury,” she says.
Clarke’s journey was all the more fraught because the very public actress was determined to keep her condition private for as long as she could. She finally told her story in 2019, just before “Game of Thrones” broadcast its eighth and final season, when she launched SameYou, a charity dedicated to brain injury recovery.
“Brain injury is very specific, because if I were to ask you where you think you reside in your body, you would probably say your brain,” she says. “So when that most fundamental part of yourself fails you, it’s terrifying on such an existential level. And it happens to one in three of us.”
SameYou partners with academics and doctors to find new ways to assist recovery, such as ground-breaking therapies and new trials. “I know what it feels like to leave hospital and not know where to turn,” Clarke says. With the support of SameYou, she hopes other survivors won’t feel so alone.
