Emilia Clarke can’t bring herself to watch House of the Dragon

House of the Dragon has officially staked its claim as a worthy follow-up to HBO’s Game of Thrones. In the months since it premiered, the Thrones prequel series has won awards, broken viewership records for HBO, and immersed viewers in a whole new era of backstabbing, warfare, and politics in Westeros.

Yet one person who hasn’t gotten in on the new fantasy craze is Emilia Clarke, who played Daenerys Targaryen in all eight seasons of Game of Thrones. Despite the fact that House of the Dragon is a show specifically about Daenerys’ ancestors, Clarke hasn’t been able to bring herself to watch it.

“No! Can you [forgive me]?” Clarke said when Variety asked whether she was House of the Dragon. “It’s too weird. I’m so happy it’s happening. I’m over the moon about all the awards…I just can’t do it. It’s so weird. It’s so strange. It’s kind of like someone saying, ‘You want to go to this school reunion that’s not your year? Want to go to that school reunion?’ That’s how it feels. I’m avoiding it.”

Emilia Clarke won’t watch House of the Dragon: “It’s too weird.”

Clarke’s run on Game of Thrones put her on the map in a huge way as an actor, and like many others who worked on the show, she’s mainly spoken positively about the experience. It’s kind of funny to think of Westeros in terms of school reunions, but it’s an effective metaphor nonetheless. It doesn’t take a lot to imagine the cringe that would result from showing up at the wrong school reunion.

Clarke shared these feelings while promoting her new film The Pod Generation at the Sundance Film Festival. The movie is a near-future science fiction romantic comedy staring Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor as parents who are trying to have a baby using a detachable artificial womb. Written and directed by Sophie Barthes (Madame Bovary), The Pod Generation explores themes of parenthood and tackles topics like abortion, which Clarke has strong opinions about.

“There’s so much politics around being a mother, having a child, not having a child…my God!” Clarke said. “How dare people have the audacity to have that kind of an opinion on someone’s life? No one has any access to how anyone feels…to try and put arguments on a person when you don’t know them or their situations… there are bigger problems we should be dealing with.”

That there are. I can’t help but wonder what Clarke’s opinion about House of the Dragon’s many birth scenes would be…but since she hasn’t seen it, we’ll never know.

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