Emilia Clarke tells how she hid her health problems while filming 'Game of Thrones'
Actress Emilia Clarke remembers how she was playing Daenerys after suffering two aneurysms. 'I kept thinking: Am I going to die? Is it going to happen to me on set?'
Last year Emilia Clarke revealed to the world that she had suffered two aneurysms while she was filming Game of Thrones. It was in a personal letter published in the New Yorker magazine where the actress, known for playing the relentless Daenerys Targaryen in the epic fantasy series on HBO, thus opened the intimacy of her health problems.
She had the first aneurysm at the end of the filming of the first season of Game of Thrones in 2011, when she was 24 years old. In 2013, while she was performing Breakfast at Tiffany's on Broadway, a brain scan revealed another aneurysm that required emergency surgery to remove.
Clarke kept these health problems a secret for all those years. In the interview book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, where various creators of Game of Thrones talk about the series (including the author of its literary source, George RR Martin, who reveals the scene that least convinces him of the adaptation), the actress tells how he managed to hide what was happening to him at the same time that the media scrutiny and pressure from fans caused him great anxiety.
"I felt as if a rubber band was squeezing my brain" she wrote in 2019 describing the first attack, which occurred during the filming of a Game of Thrones scene. "I went to the bathroom, fell to my knees and vomited violently and voluminously as the pain got worse." This is how Emilia Clarke discovered that her brain was damaged. As she went to the hospital, she mentally repeated lines of dialogue from Daenerys to calm down.
But a few weeks later, the actress returned to work as if nothing had happened. "Very few people knew what had happened. I had no idea," confesses co-executive producer Bryan Cogman.
Rolling after an aneurysm
"It was very intense," Emilia Clarke recalls in the book (via Vulture). "We were in the desert, it was hot, and I was constantly afraid that I was going to have another brain hemorrhage. I kept thinking: 'Am I going to die? Is it going to happen to me on set? That would be very inappropriate ' And any brain injury leaves you with tremendous, indescribable fatigue. I was trying my best not to show it."
"If I had told my doctor, he would have told me I needed to stop and relax. But I was just scared, and that made me panic even more, which made me think I was going to pass out in the desert. So They took me a cart with air conditioning (sorry for the planet), "explains the actress.
"During all my years on the show, I never put my own health first, which probably made other people realize it. They didn't want me to work too hard. I didn't want them to think I was a failure, that I couldn't do the job I was hired to do," he concludes.
