Emilia Clarke recalls making Game of Thrones right after having brain surgery

Emilia Clarke (Daenerys) had an incredibly tough time of it on set. “I spent a lot of time just being like: ‘Am I gonna die? Is that gonna happen on set?'”

Last year, shortly before the final season of Game of Thrones aired on HBO, Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) penned an essay where she revealed that she’d had not one but two brain aneurysms while working on the show, necessitating multiple surgeries and painful recoveries. The news came as a total shock to fans, and even on set, few people knew about Clarke’s issues; she was determined to push through and not complain even in the face of terrible pain and anxiety.

Today, Vulture has published an excerpt from James Hibberd’s upcoming oral history of Game of Thrones, Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, all about how Clarke and her coworkers dealt with the situation. It’s full of heartbreaking details, like how Clarke recalled lines of Daenerys Targaryen’s dialogue to calm herself on the way to hospital to undergo emergency surgery, and how afterwards she couldn’t even remember her own name. Nonetheless, a few weeks later she was back on set ready to film season 2. “It was crazy intense,” Clarke remembered. “We are in the desert in a quarry in like 90-degree heat, and I had the consistent fear that I was going to have another brain hemorrhage.”

"I spent a lot of time just being like: “Am I gonna die? Is that gonna happen on set? Because that would be really inconvenient.” And with any kind of brain injury, it leaves you with a fatigue that’s indescribable. I was trying so hard to keep it under wraps."

I have to admire how even when she’s remembering this painful period, Clarke maintains her sense of humor, talking about how “inconvenient” it would be if she died on set. “If I had called my doctor, he would have been like, ‘Dude, you just need to chill out,'” she continued. “But I still felt blind fear, and the fear was making me panic, and the panic was leading me to feel like I’m going to pass out in the desert. So they brought in an air-conditioned car for me.”

Showrunner Dan Weiss was one of the few people to know about Clarke’s condition. “It was terrifying because this amazing, sweet, wonderful human being came this close to not being around anymore — this person we loved so much after just one year,” he said. “Obviously you need to make the show, but the important thing was making sure she was in a safe situation. You ask yourself: Is she as safe doing this show as if she was not doing it? If she was home sitting on her couch? She was so gung ho; the main thing for us was making sure she wouldn’t put herself [in dangerous situations]. She would say, ‘Yeah, I just had brain surgery, and if I need to gallop on a horse down a mountainside, I’ll do it.’ You would have to tell her no, because she would never say no.”

I honestly don’t know if that’s admirable or scary. Looking back on it, Clarke makes clear she had no intention of letting her condition stop her, whatever the cost. “In all of my years on the show, I never put self-health first, which is probably why everyone else was worrying, as they could see that,” she said. “They didn’t want to work me too hard. I was like, ‘Don’t think I’m a failure; don’t think I can’t do the job that I’ve been hired to do. Please don’t think I’m going to fuck up at any moment.’ I had the Willy Wonka golden ticket. I wasn’t about to hand that in.”

Happily, Clarke got through this period and went on to deliver several Emmy-nominated performances as Daenerys, not to mention headlining films like Last Christmas. She also created SameYou, a charity dedicated to help people recover from brain injury and stroke.

As for Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, it comes out on October 6. It looks to be chock-full of interesting stories like this.

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