To Game of Thrones fans, Emilia Clarke will always be Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons. But she’s done lots of stuff since the HBO series ended, including appearing as the shape-shifting Skrull alien G’iah in Marvel’s Secret Invasion.
Secret Invasion ends with G’iah and the wicked Gravik having an old-fashioned superhero fight, with lots of flying and punching and such. Clarke is no stranger to special effects, but she’d never filmed anything like this. “There was a part of this fight where I was on a chariot,” she gushed to Marvel.com. “Then I was doing all the running, but I wasn’t actually running. I was on a chariot, which was being pulled by a car. And then my favorite bit is they put me on the wires!”
"I literally was like, this is my best day ever. I’m a theme park-riding kind of gal. Give me a trapeze. Give me a roller coaster. It felt exactly like that. I just kept giggling. I couldn’t stop giggling. It was genuinely the funnest day I’ve ever had on set — ever, ever, ever. if I could just live in wires, if I could be in wires now— Oh, it’s so good. After I wanted to tell everyone, I just came back, I’ve done something!"
So if Clarke shows up in a lot of action movies in the future, this is probably way; the woman likes her wires.
Emilia Clarke: Filming a superhero landing looks like “the dumbest thing ever”
One thing that was a little less epic to film was G’iah executing a classic “superhero landing,” aka a hand landing in a crouching position with one knee, one foot and one fist hitting the ground. You’ve seen it before:
It looks cool onscreen, but on set, you have to jump in place to mimic flying, which apparently feels foolish. “You just stand there, and then you got to exit the screen,” Clarke said. “You’re like, well, I actually can’t fly. And I’m not attached to the wires right now, so I’m just going to have to do the dumbest thing ever and just look really mean. And then jump. That’s exactly it. The biggest anticlimactic move. You’ve been building up. Been doing all the nasty talk. And then you just hop.”
Still, that didn’t hamper what Clarke considers “my best day.” You can watch all six episodes of Secret Invasion on Disney+ right now.
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