Emilia Clarke felt “heartbreak” for Game of Thrones showrunners after negative reaction to season 8

Game of Thrones is over, but journalists are nowhere near done asking Game of Thrones cast and crew members what they thought of the heated reaction to the show’s final season, which was, in some corners of the internet, pretty damn negative.

Ahead of the release of her new movie Last Christmas, Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) shared her feelings on those reactions with The Daily Telegraph. “I was too busy focusing on my own reactions to really pay too much attention, if any at all,” she said. “The only thing I felt truthfully sad about was that [executive producers] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] are my really good friends, and so it’s for them that I feel heartbreak, because it’s theirs.”

"Everyone is going to have their own opinion and they’re fully entitled to them. It’s art and it’s to be dissected and taken on in whatever individual way you wish.And if you’re sad that the show is done and you’re sad because you enjoyed watching it, then that’s sad. It sucks this wasn’t the perfect ending that people were hoping for, but I truly believe we would never have made everyone happy."

Clarke feeling bad for all the blowback Benioff and Weiss received feels very in keeping with her friendly, empathetic personality. As for how she herself dealt with all the vitriol that clogged the internet following the series finale back in May, she had a simple solution:

"I don’t Google myself; I don’t read reviews. Which makes it sounds like I’ve got my sh*t together, but it doesn’t help me to hear someone say, “You’re great,” and it doesn’t help me to hear someone say, “Hey, you piece of sh*t, why are you so fat?” Those are the extremes you deal with when you read about yourself on the internet, so I simply don’t."

That’s the most sensible thing I’ve read so far today.

Image: Game of Thrones/HBO

However people received the final season of Thrones, it sounds like Clarke wouldn’t trade the experience for the world, and will carry the lessons she learned from playing Daenerys forward into her career. “Oh my goodness, she taught me about lady balls,” she said of Daenerys. “She taught me what it feels like to be in a room and be heard. She wielded such power, calmness and such poise.”

"She had a fierce intensity and made some incredibly tough choices. In Season 3, she had to start busting some balls, and as a 25-year-old standing in front of 500 extras, 150 crew members, six cameras, a drone, dragons and fire, I had to bring it.I felt like if I can do that, then the red carpet doesn’t feel so scary to me at all. So there’s a certain kind of self-belief that rubs off on you as a person."

Now that Thrones is over, Clarke definitely feels a sense of freedom. “It really was the greatest moment of my life, but there is an absolute freedom that Thrones has given me — a gift-wrapped present in a little bow saying, “You’re now financially secure enough to not have to panic, so what do you want to do?’” she said. “That kind of freedom is wonderful. I could never see it during the time I was filming, because I was too close to it.”

As for she’ll do with that freedom, she fully aware that she’s not going to “top” Game of Thrones, so she’s not going to try. “I’m not going to go off and be like ‘Oh well, dragons are my thing…’ I can’t be a crazy woman demanding dragons forever! ‘These aren’t as good as my last dragons!’ Can you imagine?” Instead, she’s switching genres completely and starring in a romantic comedy called Last Christmas. She plays Kate, a dour woman working at a Christmas store who’s coming back from surviving a life-threatening illness, something Clarke has personal experience with. “It was uncanny reading the script because it’s my life at this point,” she said. “I have the benefit of having space between myself and my sickness and what you see through Kate is the fear of what happens when your body fails you in some way.”

Still, despite the presence of heavy themes, it looks like Last Christmas will be uplifting in the end, and Clarke sounds like she had a blast making it. “It was pitched to me like, ‘Emma Thompson has written a movie.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t even need to read it. Yes, I’m in, I’m 100 per cent in.’ I think she is the greatest human and with the double combo of Paul Fieg directing, it was an absolute no-brainer. Worst-case scenario, we were at least going to have a wonderful time.”

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Last Christmas opens on November 8, in time for Thanksgiving.

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