Emilia Clarke: The sex scenes in Game of Thrones have traumatized me
The Game of Thrones actress would lock herself in the bathroom to cry and drink vodka to force herself. Jason Momoa helped her resist some forcing, while the producers blackmailed her: "Don't you want to let your fans down?"
I have not seen the Game of Thrones series in a row, I liked it because of the development of some characters, and I left it because it bothered me the way in which exaggerated sex scenes were imposed on me as a spectator. It bothers me that the scripts are written assuming that the story is not enough, and that the viewer stays glued to the screen only if you give him hot scenes. I liked the plot a lot, it's something else that has kept me away.
I am not a puritan nor do I have a low tolerance for violence. I am not scandalized by a naked breast, but I feel the object of violence when intimate scenes are offered to me completely gratuitously in which the sexual relationship is always extreme, explicit, aimed only at stimulating the viewer's low instincts. They are stealing our imagination, directing it towards absolutely perverse scenarios, pushing us to associate sex only with a realm of pure hedonism in which everything is legal and no authentic bond counts.
This does not happen only with Game of Thrones, but with an increasing number of films, whose bitter side effect is to plagiarize our imagination; They suggest to us: "Look how relaxed and happy the stars are, if they do it, it means that it is the most satisfactory way." It is hinted without much dissimulation that the idea that intimacy between a man and a woman, to be satisfactory, has to abide by those canons, and I dare say it is just the other way around.
And it is assumed that young people allow themselves to be convinced by this continuous brainwashing, and that even young women feel compelled to repeat the gestures of certain television models in order to be loved in reality. Perhaps they believe that the boy they have fallen in love with expects that of them, even if that is something that troubles her.
Therefore it is good to give space to the recent statements of Emilia Clarke, especially to show them to those who are still fragile and unprotected from an emotional and affective point of view. Actresses do not feel comfortable at all when shooting certain scenes, because they are not normal, but something forced imposed by the producers, who are only interested in taking the extremes one step further ... with the sole purpose of making money.
The mother of dragons, amid the wolves of showbiz
During the first season she - she remembers her - she had no idea what she was doing, what she had in front of her. I had never been on a set of this type, I had been on a film set like twice before then, and at that moment I was on a set completely naked, with all those people, not knowing what I had to do, what was expected. from me, what did they want and what did I want. (Armchair expert)
Invited by actor Dax Shepard on her Armchair Expert podcast, Emilia Clarke dived into the past to remember what happened in 2010: she was only 23 years old, had just left the Academy of Dramatic Art and accepted the role of the iconic Daenerys. Targaryen, who was going to change his life.
She was very young and inexperienced, it is not wrong to assume that the producers of Game of Thrones took advantage of the situation for her benefit.
In the past, while the series was being shot, the Clarke defended and even applauded the risque scenes of the production. Today, freed from that context, the actress judges with much more negative accents the experience that is undoubtedly due to the launch of her career, but which has left her hard marks.
There are no misunderstandings when she, in front of Shepard's microphone, uses the adjective "terrifying" to express how she felt when filming certain sex scenes: we are in the semantic sphere of trauma, of terrible fright. Many publications have collected her words:
"They had given me the role, and they had sent me the scripts to read," says the actress on the podcast, "and when I got to those scenes I felt a bit like, 'oh shit, what now?' But I was just out of drama school, and work was work for me. She thought: if it's written in the script, you have to do it. Don't worry, everything will be fine ». But those nude scenes and sex scenes made her feel "out of the box," also because "regardless of them, I spent the entire first season thinking that she wasn't worth asking for anything. And then I would lock myself in the bathroom to cry. ”(Io donna)
In addition to crying in the bathroom, he confessed to having taken refuge in drinking to react to such a strong impact, with something that evidently disgusted him or of which he was ashamed. On the other side of the cameras were the producers, really voracious wolves hunting for prey, and I think I'm not entirely cynical towards them if I say that they had calculated well, and cruelly, every move. I wish I was wrong.
In short, Emilia was a very young actress, without the backbone of experience to say no! when required. And even more - I dare say - she had just the innocent aspect of a child, and I want to observe that more and more there is this generalized presence of sexual scenes that have as protagonists young people with a very childish appearance. Is it just my impression?
Fortunately, there were not only dark characters on set who, as Emilia Clarke always remembers, answered every question: "Don't you want to disappoint Danerys fans?" During the first series he was particularly close, with great concern, the actor Jason Momoa, who played the role of Khal Drogo, to whom Daenarys is given as his wife. The first relationship between the two is precisely a violation.
On the podcast, Shepard conjured up a scene from the first season, in which Momoa's character, Khal Drogo, rapes Daenerys on their wedding night. "He cried more than I did," recalls Clarke. “Only now do I realize how lucky I was, because that recording could have been in many, many, many different ways,” she says. “Jason had more experience, he was an experienced actor, he would help me by saying, 'Honey, this is fine, not good at all ... He always said: Can we get you a fucking tunic? He is trembling! "... He was very kind and considerate and cared about me as a human being" (The Guardian)
Curious. Behind the spotlights this scene is revealed in which the man, violent on stage, actually worries and points his finger at the real abusers. Let's not fall into the trap of film appearances: let's not take it for granted that on set the actors have fun acting out the erotic dreams of those who speculate on everything.
Intimacy is something that should remain intimate not because of the diktat of forced moralism, but because it is truly beautiful that it is so. Emilia's discomfort in exhibiting that sexual cruelty shows something that they want to make us forget: a man and a woman deserve to live fully and secretly their most intimate encounter. Sex is not taboo, but it is sacrosanctly private.
Frontal
As a corollary to these statements by Emilia Clarke, it must be remembered that she was not the only one who felt forced and upset on the set of Game of Thrones. Some claim that to find actresses for certain roles they had to go to the world of porn (Jessica Jenson, Samantha Bentley, Aeryn Walker and Sibel Kekilli) because many others refused to shoot such risque scenes. And those behind the camera weren't too comfortable either:
The director of an episode, Neil Marshall, said that the producers constantly invited him to go further: “The most absurd thing [when directing Game of Thrones] was always having an executive producer on my back who suggested 'Come on, shoot the scene fully frontal, this is television, you can do whatever you want. Do it, I insist that you do it '”(Lifesite)
Did you know that the biggest porn industries complained that every time a Game of Thrones episode was released the porn web traffic plummeted? It seems eloquent to me.
