Emilia Clarke gave Emma D’Arcy advice before House of the Dragon

Being the heir to the Iron Throne is a high-pressure job. No one knows that as well as Emilia Clarke, who played the mother of dragons herself, Daenerys Targaryen, on Game of Thrones. We met a new batch of Targaryens over on the Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon, which follows the decline of House Targaryen nearly 200 years before Daenerys was born.

One of the main players on House of the Dragon is Rhaenyra Targaryen, the heir apparent to the Seven Kingdoms and leader of one of the factions which will be vying for the Iron Throne in the Dance of the Dragons civil war. Rhaenyra was played in season 1 by Milly Alcock as a teenager and Emma D’Arcy as an adult. D’Arcy will play the role for the rest of the show.

It would make sense if D’Arcy went to Clarke, the most famous Targaryen from Game of Thrones, for advice on managing it all. Which is exactly what they did, as they discussed in a recent actor roundtable interview put on by The Hollywood Reporter:

Emma D’Arcy was told “loads of stuff” by Emilia Clarke about joining the Game of Thrones universe

“I spoke to Emilia Clarke before I started shooting, and she was beautiful and so generous,” D’Arcy recalled. “[She told me] loads of stuff, which honestly, I’m going to keep for myself. I’m also very lucky. That wig is a blessing; people don’t recognize me, so my day-to-day is broadly unchanged, which I feel very grateful for, not least because, and maybe this is also a question, I feel that the ability to observe others and not be the observed is so fundamentally important to our job. I guess I’ve just really worried about that.”

The pressure of being on an enormous show like House of the Dragon can’t be understated, so it’s good to see that D’Arcy is getting support, both from Clarke and from her wigs.

Emilia Clarke trolls Kit Harington in Secret Invasion interview

Clarke herself is currently making the press rounds to talk up her new Marvel series Secret Invasion, where she stars as a shapeshifting Skrull alien named G’iah. A reporter for Brazilian news outlet Omelete asked Clarke if she sought out any reassurance from her former Game of Thrones costar Kit Harington (Jon Snow) about joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe, since he entered it several years earlier as Dane Whitman in Eternals.

“No…no, no,” Clarke said, appearing to rack her brain before bursting out laughing. “I didn’t call Kit. I hang out with Kit a lot, and it’s not like I don’t want his opinion, it’s not like I don’t want his advice. You know, it was like ‘Hey dude, we’re both in the MCU! Yay!’ It was kind of more like that, rather than me checking on his experience.”

“And let’s face it, I got the bigger part, so I didn’t want to make him feel bad,” Clarke added, causing both herself and her Secret Invasion costar Ben Mendelsohn (Talos) to break down in laughter again.

D’Arcy is currently filming House of the Dragon season 2, which is expected to release sometime next summer. Secret Invasion airs new episodes on Disney+ on Wednesdays.

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