In a new interview, the actor reflected on her agony and said, “I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was afraid of being fired!”
Written by Prerna Mittra |Updated : November 3, 2023 11:54 AM IST
Emilia Clarke, who played the formidable dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen in the cult HBO series Game of Thrones, suffered from two brain aneurysms that nearly took her life in the early days of filming. She opened up about it a few years ago, writing in an essay for The New Yorker that the health scares began soon after the first season of the fantasy drama. Clarke said just before she started shooting in 2011, she felt a “shooting, stabbing, constricting pain” in her head while working out with her trainer.
The actor felt as though “an elastic band was squeezing [her] brain”. “I tried to ignore the pain and push through it, but I just couldn’t. Somehow, almost crawling, I made it to the locker room. I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill. Meanwhile, the pain…was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged.”
Clarke, now 37, was taken to a hospital where an MRI scan showed an aneurysm that required a brain surgery. During a two-week recovery period, the then-24-year-old could not even remember her name, a result of a condition called aphasia.
In her 2019 essay, the star also wrote that the diagnosis was “quick and ominous”. “A subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a life-threatening type of stroke, caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain… I’d never experienced fear like that — a sense of doom closing in. I could see my life ahead, and it wasn’t worth living. I am an actor; I need to remember my lines. Now I couldn’t recall my name.”
But, even as she was undergoing all this, Clarke recently revealed that she was more afraid of being fired from her job in Game of Thrones. The actor played ‘Mother of Dragons’ in the television adaptation of George R R Martin’s novel series, A Song of Ice and Fire.
In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar published this month, the actor reflected on her agony and said that even though she was dealing with a condition that causes immediate death for a third of all patients, she was not afraid of dying. “I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was afraid of being fired! I decided: ‘This is not something that’s going to define me’.”
When she had a second haemorrhage and a subsequent surgery, Clarke felt “very ashamed”, as she thought the producers would think of her as “an unreliable person that they’ve hired”.
Looking back, the actor — who founded SameYou, which focuses on rehabilitation for survivors of stroke and brain injury — looks at the experience differently. “If I hadn’t had a brain haemorrhage, I might have turned into a right old d***head, thinking I was the bee’s knees, living in Hollywood. I’m so much more aware of what’s happening, in the moment that it’s happening. I don’t worry about failure I thrive on failure! If something goes wrong, I always think you can fix it. It hurts, it’s scary, but then you can do anything,” she told the publication.
ncG1vNJzZmhqZGy7psPSmqmorZ6Zwamx1qippZxemLyue8Keo56aXZy2tMCOnqSipJmWeqS4wKuinmWSp66quoycpqecmam2sLqO