Emilia Clarke on why she turned down the lead role in Fifty Shades of Grey
By Dan Selcke
With Game of Thrones over, Emilia Clarke is ready to step into a whole new world of roles — with the success she’s had on the show, she should have her pick.
And really, she’s had her pick for a while. A few years back, Sam Taylor-Johnson approached her about playing the lead role in 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey, a famously sexy story about a college student who enters into a BDSM relationship with a wealthy industrialist. Speaking on The Hollywood Reporter’s Dramatic Actress Roundtable, Clarke explained why she turned the role down:
"The last time that I was naked on camera on [Game of Thrones] was a long time ago, and yet it is the only question that I ever get asked because I am a woman. And it’s annoying as hell and I’m sick and tired of it because I did it for the character — I didn’t do it so some guy could check out my tits, for God’s sake. So, that coming up, I was like, “I can’t.” I did a minimal amount and I’m pigeonholed for life, so me saying yes to [Fifty Shades], where the entire thing is about sensuality and sex and being naked and all of that stuff, I was just like, ‘No way am I going to voluntarily walk into that situation and then never be able to look someone in the eye and be like, ‘No, you can’t keep asking me this question.’"
As Daenerys Targaryen, Clarke got to do a lot of interesting stuff, from leading armies to riding dragons to burning cities, but it’s true that she got asked about her few nude scenes a lot, to the point where she seemed pretty bored with the question fairly early on. “If you’ve watched Game of Thrones then, spoiler, you will have seen me in the nude,” she wrote back in 2017. “There are plenty of ways in which people want me to respond to questions about this fact. And plenty of reasons why I do not feel the need to justify myself.
So yeah, we can see why she’d want to avoid a movie like Fifty Shades of Grey, although she clarified that she had nothing against the movie itself, or Taylor-Johnson. “I love her, and I thought her vision was beautiful.”
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The whole roundtable discussion is worth reading. Clarke is joined by Michelle Williams, Patricia Arquette, Christine Baranski, Danai Gurira and Niecy Nash.
You can see more clips on THR’s YouTube page.
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