Featured Image Credit: HBO
Topics: Game Of Thrones, Celebrity, Sex and Relationships, Jason Momoa, TV And Film, Entertainment
Britt Jones
Topics: Game Of Thrones, Celebrity, Sex and Relationships, Jason Momoa, TV And Film, Entertainment
Emilia Clarke might be a professional actress with a long list of credits now, but at one point she was just a woman faced with the ultimate challenge to her career.
If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, you’ll know Clarke for her amazing decade-long portrayal of Daenerys Targaryen, but you may not know just how many tears it took to go through with the role.
In the beginning, she was just 23 when she started filming and would later say that the prospect of so many nude scenes was 'terrifying'.
Clarke explained that she had a major case of 'imposter syndrome times a million' on set, but her on-screen husband Jason Momoa (Khal Drogo) made it so much easier to handle.
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However, that doesn’t mean it was easy and Clarke was left ‘crying’ before the scenes.
When asked about a particularly hard scene in which he 'virtually rapes' her on their wedding night, Clarke replied: "He was crying more than I was.
"It's only now that I realise how fortunate I was with that, because that could have gone many, many, many different ways.
"Because Jason had experience – he was an experienced actor who had done a bunch of stuff before coming on to this – he was like, 'Sweetie, this is how it's meant to be, this is how it's not meant to be, and I'm going to make sure that that's the f***ing gaze.'
"He was always like, 'Can we get her a f***ing robe? She's shivering!'
"He was so kind and considerate and cared about me as a human being."
Speaking on the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard podcast in 2019, she explained that she didn't even know there would be nudity when she first accepted the offer.
"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 said.
"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 going to make sense of it and that's what I'm going to do and everything's going to be cool.
"I've never been on a film set like this before," she added.
"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."
Since then, she’s gone on to do amazing things, with films like Me Before You, Terminator Genisys and The Pod Generation.
But we’ll all remember her as Daenerys of the House Targaryen, the first of her name, the unburnt, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the first men, Queen of Meereen, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, protector of the Realm, Lady Regent of the Seven Kingdoms, breaker of chains and mother of dragons.