Emilia Clarke now looks back on her brain hemorrhages as “a good thing”

Before the final season of Game of Thrones aired, star Emilia Clarke wrote an essay in The New Yorker talking about a pair of brain hemorrhages she had in the early days of the show, frankly walking readers through the painful experience of struggling against her own body as she played Daenerys Targaryen, one of television’s strongest characters. “In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug,” she wrote. “I asked the medical staff to let me die. My job—my entire dream of what my life would be—centered on language, on communication. Without that, I was lost.”

Happily, not only did she pull through, she thrived, getting award nominations left and right for her work on Thrones and embarking on a movie career. Looking back, she can finally put that experience in perspective. “I’m at the point where I definitely think of the brain hemorrhage as a good thing,” she recently told The Guardian. “Because I was never destined to be the ‘young actor goes off the rails’ type, up and down the gossip columns. And having a brain hemorrhage that coincided precisely with the beginning of my career and the beginning of a show that became something quite meaty, it gave me a perspective that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

"I’m quite a resilient human being, so a parent dying and brain hemorrhages coinciding with success and people following you in the street and getting stalkers – you’re just, like, ‘Well let’s try and make something sensible of it.’"

Among the most sensible things she did is create SameYou, a charity that helps young people work through stroke and brain injury. But first, she had to wrestle with telling people at all. “It was nerve-racking to share it, to be honest,” she recalled. “It always is, when you make yourself vulnerable…I didn’t want people to think of me as… sick.” She also described that period of her life in a recent issue of Wonderland:

"I do feel like the brain hemorrhages are the literal, physical embodiment of what it is to be attacked on a social media because I didn’t want to look anyone in the eye, and I didn’t want anyone to recognize me. I wanted to disappear completely, to wipe myself off the face of the earth, because I couldn’t handle the level of interaction. Because I felt totally laid bare, totally vulnerable, totally in pain."

Speaking of getting attacked on social media, brain hemorrhages weren’t the only stressor Clarke dealt with during her time on Game of Thrones. Being on a very popular show is a blessing, obviously, but it comes with downsides, like stalkers. One of her regular stalkers, she said, is very unwell, and another very mean. “The stalker stuff is just horrible because, as a single lady walking around town, I already feel like I’m being followed.”

It’s a strange problem to have, both for the obvious reasons and because, as Clarke acknowledges, “having a relationship with people I don’t know is a big part of what I signed up for.”

"I care about what art does to people. But it carries with it a responsibility, and when you leave your front door you take that with you. And it’s a difficult path to navigate. Because sometimes, you get grabbed physically [by someone who’s not a stalker] and your instincts kick in. When you see shock being registered on someone else’s face, you’re like, ‘Where’s the danger?’ And then you realise, oh, it’s me – I’m the danger."

In short, Emilia Clarke leads a life which calls for the occasional period of decompression. The toll of the breakneck pace at which she’d been living really hit her after the premiere for the final season of Thrones. “After we did the premiere for the last season, it felt suddenly like I lost all of the bones in my body,” she remembered. “And I was in this puddle on the floor going, ‘Maybe this isn’t just the show.’ I’d never wanted to look around and see what we had, because I was convinced it was just going to blow up in our faces. And, well, at the end it kind of did.”

"So I kept my head down. Then, after the premiere, I finally was able to stop, and that was difficult. [I traveled and went] raving with my mates, but that was not fulfilling. So, bloated and exhausted I went away for two weeks with my best girlfriend, Rose Leslie, and it was in this retreat in India that I suddenly got it. This is what stopping feels like. And I was able to finally… be kind to myself."

There is, delightfully, a photographic record of this retreat:

All of these experiences have gotten Clarke to where she is now: a place where she can put what she does in context. “Entertainment is about taking you outside of yourself for a second, which is largely what I think the success of Game of Thrones was,” she said. “People wanted to see something familiar, but also have that level of separation, through dragons and magic. Escapism is what lots of people go to art for. So, if we can cherry-pick stories to tell people in a shitty time, I’d like to give them something really good. It could make them feel better, or less alone, or make them realize there’s something outside of their front door that they should care about.”

“You know, I spent a lot of time being like, ‘What I do is all bullshit. I’m completely selfish, a total narcissist’…And then I realised what it was for. I help provide relief. And that’s worth something, especially now. Right?”

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h/t Metro