EMILIA CLARKE: GAME OF THRONES PRODUCERS MANIPULATED ME INTO DOING MORE NUDITY
Emilia Clarke was naked a lot in Game of Thrones, the first season especially. In later seasons, Emilia’s character, Daenerys, would still drop trou, but often it would shot around her so nothing was really showing, or the brief nudity would be “empowering” for Dany. But yeah, the first season was bad – Emilia was constantly in a state of undress. I thought/hoped that was probably all contractual, and worked out with Emilia and her agents far in advance. Turns out, not so much. Emilia chatted with Dax Shepherd’s Armchair Expert podcast, which you can hear here. Emilia spoke about how she was basically pressured and manipulated by producers to do more nudity than her contract covered.
Emilia Clarke has revealed that she once refused to perform a nude scene on the set of a project, despite being told that it would “disappoint” her Game of Thrones fans. While discussing on-screen nudity with Dax Shepard on his podcast Armchair Expert, the Last Christmas actor recalled being asked to perform a nude scene she hadn’t agreed to in advance.
“I’m a lot more savvy [now] with what I’m comfortable with, and what I am okay with doing,” she explained. “I’ve had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up’, and they’re like, ‘You don’t wanna disappoint your Game of Thrones fans’. And I’m like, ‘F*** you.’”
Clarke also revealed that she felt overwhelmed by what she described as the “f*** ton of nudity” in the first season of Game of Thrones. “I took the job and then they sent me the scripts and I was reading them, and I was, like, ‘Oh, there’s the catch!’” she remembered. “But I’d come fresh from drama school, and I approached [it] as a job – if it’s in the script then it’s clearly needed, this is what this is and I’m gonna make sense of it… Everything’s gonna be cool.”
She continued: “So I came to terms with that beforehand, but then going in and doing it… I’m floating through this first season and I have no idea what I’m doing, I have no idea what any of this is. I’ve never been on a film set like this before, I’d been on a film set twice before then, and I’m now on a film set completely naked with all of these people, and I don’t know what I’m meant to do and I don’t know what’s expected of me, and I don’t know what you want and I don’t know what I want… Regardless of there being nudity or not, I would have spent that first season thinking I’m not worthy of requiring anything, I’m not worthy of needing anything at all… Whatever I’m feeling is wrong, I’m gonna cry in the bathroom and then I’m gonna come back and we’re gonna do the scene and it’s gonna be completely fine.”
She went on to explain that it was only while working with Aquaman actor Jason Momoa, who played her on-screen love interest Khal Drogo, that she realised that she could set her own rules about how much of her body she was willing to show. “It was definitely hard,” she said. “Which is why the scenes, when I got to do them with Jason, were wonderful, because he was like, ‘No, sweetie, this isn’t okay.’ And I was like, ‘Ohhhh.’”
Big props to Jason Momoa for doing something to protect her and for telling her that’s not the way it’s supposed to work. Jason and Emilia are still very close, and I get the feeling that’s how it was from the start, that he was protective of her. Iain Glen was another one – I remember interviews with him where he spoke about how green and inexperienced she was in the first season and how he would often try to figure out ways where Emilia would not have to be so naked in front of so many people on set. But yeah, GoT producers were gross and exploitative. We knew that. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss ruined all of it.
Also: I’ve been reading a lot of those actress-roundtable discussions and actor-on-actor series, and some of the actresses have been talking about the immediate changes they saw when #MeToo and Time’s Up started happening. Films have been hiring “intimacy” coaches or various protective middlemen to come in whenever there is a sex scene or when an actor is nude, and the coach is there to tell the director what is and is not allowed contractually and to stand up for the actresses, etc. The actresses seem to like the protective measures being taken now, although clearly those practices are A) very recent and B) not widespread.
