When Emilia Clarke improvised an amazing monologue on Game of Thrones

How well did Emilia Clarke understand the Valyrian language? Enough to basically rattle off a whole monologue that became an iconic Game of Thrones scene.

Although she never got the Emmy she deserved, Emilia Clarke absolutely tore it up as Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones. She brought a lot of range to the character, taking her from an uncertainly waifish young girl to a powerful leader to a pyromaniacal tyrant, all without missing a beat.

And she contributed more to the character than even we knew. For example, take a scene from the episode “Kill the Boy,” in the show’s fifth season. Daenerys has just learned that the Sons of the Harpy killed her loyal knight, Ser Barristan Selmy. Angry, she summons the Great Masters of Meereen and takes them down to the chamber where she’s keeping her two dragons (she suspects one of more of them is directing the Sons of the Harpy). She gives them a creepy monologue about the choices she faces as a leader, all delivered in Valyrian — Clarke was always wonderful at speaking in the show’s made-up languages.

And then, Daenerys feeds a random Master to her dragons, even though there’s no guarantee he did anything wrong, as an example to the rest not to screw with her.

It’s a good scene, and one of the few that suggests she might be capable of burning down King’s Landing in the final season, something the writers struggled to set up. And originally, it played very differently, as episode director Jeremy Podeswa told Entertainment Weekly’s James Hibberd.

At first, Clarke shot her monologue in English, as scripted. But then showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, who were watching the scene being shot, thought it might work better delivered in Valyrian. Podeswa agreed, but scenes in Valyrian were generally worked out well at advance, with time for linguist David Peterson to translate the lines and time for the actors to learn them. But Clarke was up for an on-the-spot challenge.

“I went over to Emilia and I was like, ‘I know this is a really big ask, but do you think you could figure out a way to do this in Valyrian?’” Podeswa remembered. “She said, ‘Yeah, sure, I think I can do this.’ And I’m all, “Really?” Then she went off and cobbled together things that [Daenerys] had said in the past that made sense. She came back in 10 minutes and had this whole monologue down.”

"I just had to hand it to Emilia for taking on the challenge and making it completely credible. Every single take, every intonation, and the way she phrased everything, you completely understood what she was meant to be saying. Then the subtitles all seemed authentic to what she was doing. She knew the language well enough at that point to make it all work. It wasn’t tracking perfectly in Valyrian, but no fan ever noticed it. She did an amazing job."

No kidding.

You can find more stories like this in Hibberd’s new book:

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