Even over half a decade since the series came to an end, Game of Thrones remains one of the most passionately debated television series of all time. Between the final season and series finale that most viewers didn't feel held up to the rest of the show and the constant back and forth about creative control, there's still a lot for fans to continue to debate years and years later.
To this day, the fantasy saga's spinoffs House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms inspire similar conversations surrounding its stories and creators, but nothing compared to the original. We have often wondered whether the cast would have changed anything about the show or the characters, or if they even had the choice to, which Emilia Clarke is now shedding light on.
Emilia Clarke explains David Benioff and D. B. Weiss' strict rules about sticking to the scripts
In a new interview with Variety, Daenerys Targaryen actress Emilia Clarke spoke about her time on Game of Thrones and shared some new details about the making of the series. When asked if she could talk Benioff and Weiss into flipping the script on Daenerys' fate, Clarke shared that the showrunners remained "fastidious about us saying the lines exactly as they’ve written them."
It's no surprise that on a show like Game of Thrones, the creators and writers wouldn't want the actors to veer from the script. After all, the series' adaptation of George R.R. Martin's beloved book was already a massive undertaking that didn't leave much more room for character improvisation. But Clarke didn't feel at all that she was being held back by acting the scripts to the letter.
"Aside from what I brought as an actor, I didn’t have any creative input, nor did I want any," Clarke explained to Variety. The actress also referred to her old bosses as "geniuses" and felt that she wasn't qualified at that time in her career to have a producer-type role on the set of a television series, a role she stepped into with her Peacock spy thriller Ponies, which released in January 2026.
Benioff and Weiss were so adamant about the actors following what was written on the page that they would have the actors do another take of a scene if they accidentally said "it's" in place of "it is," as Clarke also shared. Honestly, that makes sense for the show's setting and time period, as much as it sounds nitpicky on the part of the creators. But fans would have definitely noticed.
While making Game of Thrones for each of its eight seasons, Clarke didn't feel stifled by the creative process as an actress. She said, "I was given the seasons, and I, to the best of my ability, empathized and understood and tracked every choice she made so it felt like mine. I felt like that was what my job was." And I think we can all attest that she did an incredible job becoming Daenerys!
You would think that all these years later, Clarke or any other star from the series would have grown tired of constantly looking back and talking about Game of Thrones, but the actress expressed that she now simply feels "grateful" and "lucky" to have been part of the show and everything that she has been able to accomplish in her career because of its success and her amazing performance.
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