When an actor made an inappropriate comment about Nathalie Emmanuel’s “revealing” Game of Thrones costume, Emilia Clarke had her back.
Nathalie Emmanuel is out there promoting her new Quibi comedy Die Hart, where she plays an action movie star alongside Kevin Hart and John Travolta. But a lot of fans will most likely know her as Missandei, Daenerys Targaryen’s right-hand woman on Game of Thrones.
And it sounds like the camaraderie we saw onscreen wasn’t faked. Speaking to Vogue, Emmaneul remembers she and Emilia Clarke bonding straight away. “Emilia and I got on like a house on fire from the beginning,” she said, using a very Targaryen-appropriate analogy. “When I joined the cast, she had already been shooting Game of Thrones for a few years, and she was definitely ready to have some female energy around her.”
"She and I always looked out for each other. If you’re the only girls on a male-dominated set, it bonds you in a certain way. For example, in my first season, my costume was pretty revealing, and there was an incident with a supporting actor who made a comment about it on set – I mean, typical – and Emilia straightaway had my back. It got handled."
Emmanuel would go on to have a large supporting roll on the show for six straight seasons, with lots of memorable moments. The role has led her to other work, including fronting a Four Weddings and a Funeral show on Hulu and joining the Fast & Furious franchise. From the start, Emmanuel knew this was a show she wanted to be a part of.
“I had been watching the show before I even auditioned for it,” Emmanuel told Essence. “I used to phone my agent and be like, ‘Do you ever hear anything from the casting office for Game of Thrones?’ I knew that they didn’t really cast people that looked like me. There were definitely a few throughout the seasons, but not regular established roles that had ongoing storylines. And so I told her, ‘Oh, I really want to be in that show. If they ever have a character that looks like me or can look like me, I really want to audition for it.’”
"So, when that casting came in, I saw it on some casting breakdown website. Then I phoned my agent and she went, ‘I’ve already seen it. You’ve got an audition on Wednesday.’ I was desperate for an audition. I was like, ‘I want to be a part of that.‘"
From there, Emmanuel was off to the races, “watching millions of videos of translators in preparation.”
"Once I landed the role, I got completely thrown in at the deep end – especially when it came to languages. Missandei is obviously this great linguist, and I became really committed to learning Valyrian – high Valyrian and low Valyrian, which are as different as Latin and Italian. David [J Peterson], who created the languages for the TV series, is an absolute genius. Sometimes when I was being really obsessive, [show creators] Dan [Weiss] and David [Benioff] would be like, “Nathalie, there is literally only one person on earth who knows this language and whether you’re pronouncing that correctly.” And I’d be like, “I know, but I’m still going to get it right.”"
Well, there’s probably more than one person now; you know you can learn High Valyrian on Duolingo now?
In any case, It’s great to see how dedicated the cast members were to their roles. What Emmanuel does with the rest of her career, she can be proud of what she accomplished on Game of thrones.
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