Emilia Clarke opened up about the terrifying moment she thought she had “cheated death” after suffering two brain bleeds during her stay in game of Thrones.
Talking about the How to fail with Elizabeth’s day On the podcast, the 39-year-old actress revealed that the medical emergencies left her emotionally shut down and convinced, at one point, that she was “destined to die.”
Clarke, who rose to fame playing Daenerys Targaryen, admitted that the constant fear of her own mortality consumed all her thoughts after the second incident.
The first bleed occurred just after the first season of the hit HBO show ended.
Clarke recalled collapsing during a workout at a gym in London and described the feeling as if a rubber band had snapped inside her head.
While waiting for medical help, she repeatedly told herself that she was “an actress” in a desperate attempt to stay conscious and protect the dream job she had just begun.
However, the recovery was marred by a deep sense of shame, as she feared her employers would consider her “weak” or “broken” if they knew the extent of her condition.
While Clarke told showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss about her health, she kept the ordeal private for years.
His health worsened again while performing on Broadway in New York, where a second aneurysm required emergency surgery that nearly claimed his life.
She recalled the harrowing time when doctors told her parents every half hour that they thought she was going to die.
This second test was even more exhausting, causing him to disconnect from the world because he felt that his body and brain had failed him in a way that no one else could perceive.
The actress admitted that she gave herself very little grace during her recovery and that she saw the illness as a personal failure.
At one point, while promoting the show at San Diego Comic-Con shortly after the surgery, he recalled thinking that if he was going to die, “I would do it on live television.”
Despite the trauma, Clarke credited her career for helping her survive the emotional fallout, stating that she doesn’t know what she would have done without her job to focus on.
Today, Clarke uses her experience to help others through her charity SameYou, which she founded in 2019 to support brain injury survivors.
She has been candid about the deep feeling of loneliness that often follows such an injury and her goal is to help others overcome that isolation.
A look back at his passage through a decade in game of ThronesHe now sees the series as “lightning in a bottle” and a defining chapter of his youth.
