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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Emilia Clarke on a Near-Death Experience Scarier than “Game of Thrones”
00:19:20
Emilia Clarke was an unknown young actor when she landed the part of Daenerys, of the House of Targaryen, on a show called “Game of Thrones.” After an eventful first season—capped by her walk into a funeral pyre and rebirth as the Mother of Dragons—Clarke’s future looked bright. But after filming wrapped, Clarke faced a crisis more frightening than anything on the show: a life-threatening stroke called a subarachnoid hemorrhage. In the aftermath of an emergency surgery, she experienced verbal aphasia and was unable to say her name. “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced,” she told David Remnick. “It wasn’t that I didn’t think I was going to make it, it was that I wasn’t prepared to make it.” She feared that the impairment was permanent and would end her life as an actor. “It was in that moment I asked them to just let me die.” Clarke was still recovering from the aftermath of the stroke and the surgery when she began doing a press tour—lying down between appearances and s...
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A
From One World Trade center in Manhattan. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of the New Yorker and WNYC studios.
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B
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us. I'm David Remnick. My guest today is one of the most important women in television and indeed all the known fantasy world. Her resume is impressive, to say the least, with credentials including the Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Queen of Meereen, Lady Regent of the Seven Kingdoms, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons. I'm talking, of course, about Daenerys on HBO's Game of Thrones, played by Emilia Clarke.
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C
I am Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, of the Blood of Old Valyria. I am the dragon's daughter, and I swear to you that those who would harm you will die screaming. You will not hear me.
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B
She survived seven seasons of Game of Thrones, and we're about to find out quite soon if she survives the eighth and final season. And if I said it's eagerly anticipated, that would be the understatement of the television decade. I spoke with Emilia Clarke just last week. Amelia, I have to tell you, I kind of grew up as a journalist at the Washington Post, and, of course, all I ever wanted to do was break a story bigger than Watergate. So do me a big solid and tell me the entire ending plot for Game of Thrones.
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C
Well, I mean, it's so. It's so I all. It's all I want to do. Genuinely, all I want to do is just tell people. It's like this thing when you're stood on top of a skyscraper and you're like, I'm just gonna throw myself off. I'm gonna throw myself off this building. And I feel the very. I feel the same about Game of Thrones. I feel like one day I'm just. It's just gonna come out because I can't keep it in anymore.
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B
What happens if you give up the plot? Do the cops come and get you?
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C
I think so. I genuinely think that's what will happen. I think that HBO or Nightwalker's just gonna turn up on my door and go, well, now it's time.
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B
Let me try a different tact then.
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C
Yeah, exactly. Wow.
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B
So in the first season, Daenerys goes from abused daughter of the ousted king into an unwanted marriage. Then she falls in love with her husband. He gets killed. She throws herself into his funeral pyre. She emerges from the fire reborn with three baby dragons. It's pretty incredible.
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C
That's Season one.
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B
What was the most memorable part of that season?
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C
Of that season? Almost every minute of that season was memorable. It was. I will never again. And I doubt anyone who's a part of it will feel the camaraderie and the. Just the joy of it never felt polished. It never felt like anyone really knew exactly what was going on. Everyone was just running on adrenaline and trying to figure it out. And we knew we had something exciting, but we didn't really know what it was. And. And we're all new. I mean, I was. I was a part of. I think there's. There was like six or seven of us who were all the same age, all with zero experience, all British, all kind of just going, oh, this is pretty cool. But there's a number of moments that really stand out for me in that season. But, I mean, walking out of the fire was probably. Walking into the fire, actually was the. Cause I kind of set myself alight a little bit.
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B
You did?
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C
Cause I. Well, yeah, I was so. I was so earnestly trying to do everything that anyone would ever want me to do because I just didn't want to mess up.
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B
Wait, you got. So you got. Did you get. Did you get burned?
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C
Well, I mean, so I walked into the fire, and they. I just never forget everyone being like, stop. Cause we'd built a fire. We built a real fire. And there were these flame bars that I could walk through to sort of simulate it looking like me walking into this fire completely. But in the middle was the real fire. So I just kept walking because I thought someone would tell me, you should not do that. And I just never forget there's this ring on my. This metal ring on my costume, and it just started to get burning hot. And then my costume is quite. You know, I'm pretty sure we sprayed it, but it was quite flimsy. And I just remember a little tiny bit of it just went poof and caught. And I was like, oh, I need to put that out. Oh, I'm in the middle of a fire. But all the crew and everyone involved was screaming for me to get out. And I just. I don't know. I was just sort of in the moment.
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B
So, Amelia, the filming of this ends after the first season. You go home to London.
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C
Yes.
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B
You visit with your parents in Oxfordshire. You describe this in your new yorker.com article. And then on a fine February day, you do what people do. You go to the gym. You're gonna work out with your trainer, and you're sitting there in a locker room, and you're overcome. What happens?
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C
Yeah, well, I really dragged myself to the gym that day. I'm sure anyone who's dragging themselves to the gym right now will empathize, but it was the kind of exhaustion that was sort of. It was incredibly exhausting to even put on my shoes. And then I'm doing the plank and. And I suddenly get this unbelievable pain that felt very much like an elastic band around my brain. Excruciating. And whilst, you know, you're used to things hurting in the gym, I was pretty aware quite early on that that wasn't normal. So the rest is kind of blurry as to how I managed to get to the loo. But I sort of crawled my way there and then was just violently ill. And I knew in that moment, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that headache like that and throwing up means brain damage. So I just kind of went into fighter mode, you know. Death Con 5 it was. I was trying to move every part of my body that I could and trying to kind of at every point ask myself questions of, where are you? What's your name? What your parents names? You know, what date is it? Think of a line from the TV show you've just finished filming. Everything I could to stay present in the moment that was just so much.
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B
Pain and you're completely alone in the bathroom, nobody can hear you.
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C
Well, I mean, I don't know what kind of noises I must have been making, but there's a woman who was in the stall next to me and I've never seen her face. I don't know who she was at all, but she pulled me out of the bathroom and on into the recovery position and was trying to get help. An ambulance turns up and someone's got my phone and I think they're calling my mum and. Yeah, and then I get in the ambulance and. And I arrive at this hospital in London after quite a bumpy journey and they sort of don't quite know what to. What to do because it's so hard to diagnose this.
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B
This being what?
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C
This being a brain hemorrhage.
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B
Yeah.
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C
So I had bleeding on the brain.
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B
So the surgery you had was not a craniotomy. They did not open up your skull. They go in through a femoral artery.
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C
Yes.
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B
And a kind of wire goes up and around and up miraculously to your brain, and it seals things off and out you come and you had this. This took some hours and then you wake up. What did the doctors tell you about your prognosis?
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C
What could you Expect I was so out of it before they put me under, before they gave me the surgery. So I had zero information as to, as to what I was expected to feel or how I was. And that continued for at least the first week, at least, of just not really knowing, not really being present.
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B
You write that there's a kind of two week barrier that you gotta get past. And obviously you got past it, but after that you experienced a real difficulty speaking or recalling your name. Describe that, because that must have been scary as hell.
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C
Oh, my God. Yeah. So they wake you up every two hours in a brain ward, ask you questions, where are you? What's the date? What's the prime minister? What's your name? And they woke me up at, you know, 2:00am or whatever it was. And as you know, I was getting very like, hey, listen, you don't need to keep waking me up for two hours, okay? I know how to say my name. And I couldn't.
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B
In fairness, you have a long name.
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C
Yes, yes. Amelia Isabel Euphemia Rose Clark. My brain was screaming. It. It was screaming the answer, but I knew that I wasn't forming the words. It wasn't. I couldn't make sense. And it was the scary. It was the scariest thing I've ever experienced in my life. I was, especially as someone who, as you're quickly realizing, talks a lot, every part of me is, is. Is, you know, relating to another human being. And I. And in that moment I felt if I can't communicate, I don't know how to do that.
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B
In the New Yorker piece, you describe thinking that you are not gonna make it and maybe that you don't want to.
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C
Yeah, it wasn't so much that I didn't think I was gonna make it. It was that I wasn't prepared to make. Was in that moment. I asked them to just let me die, literally. It was one thing being, you know, having the bleeding, getting over it and trying to figure out what my life would be, but having that as a. As a thing that I would have to live with for the rest of my life. I, in that moment, I just, just was. Wasn't ready to carry on.
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B
Why did you decide to keep this catastrophe secret?
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C
Well, in the beginning, it was season one. It was very much, no one knows who the hell I am. I really just. I don't want to call. I'm gonna say this. I don't want to cause any trouble. I don't want anyone to think I'm not capable of doing the job that they've given Me, which is my first big job.
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B
You were scared they were gonna take it away from you?
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C
Yeah, I think I was scared they were gonna take it away from me. I think I was also. I just didn't want to be a bother.
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B
Okay. That's the most English thing I've ever heard. You didn't want to be a bother after brain surgery?
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C
Yeah, more than anything, I was a young girl who was given a huge opportunity, and I did not, for any reason, want to give anyone a reason to think I was anything other than beyond capable of fulfilling my duties that they'd given me. And I didn't even know what the show was at that point. All I knew was that I had a job.
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B
Well, your first duty was to deal with a publicity tour. The show absolutely blew up. Yeah, it became incredibly famous. It would become even more so as the seasons rolled on. How did you deal with that publicity tour while still not quite even remotely back to 100%?
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C
Well, HPA were a. Incredible. It's only looking back now that I realize how kind and generous they were with me as I. As I went to the photo shoots with my morphine bottle and straw. It was my first. My first publicity shoot. And. And they made it just, you know, well, we've got this room, and you can just sit down and. And actually this photo is just going to be lying down and. And what else can we do to kind of make this a little bit easier for you? And those days were just a haze, an absolute haze of God awful fatigue and fear.
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B
So HBO knew, obviously, your family knew, but it's more or less a secret. You go back to film season two, and you say in your essay that it was your worst season of the eight. Why is that?
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C
Yeah, well, it was such a. Season one was such a hard act to follow for Daenerys because, like I said, everything happened then. And then season two, even in the books, she's sort of in a holding pattern. And at the same time, I was every day thinking I was gonna die, and I didn't want to do that on set.
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B
Well, there was a big shadow hanging over. You knew now that not only were you recovering from the aneurysm that you had had surgery on, but you had another one, a small one, on the other side of your brain.
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C
Yes. So that was the thing that I missed out. But they told me quite early on, but it was. So we were dealing so much with the first one that we sort of just were like, oh, yeah, so there's another one on the other side and it's only when you le. That then that other one on the other side becomes your every thought that maybe that's just going to rupture. Because who. Who would. What. What would. What would stop it from. From rupturing if the other one already has? But the second one was so small that the risk factor of operating was greater than just letting it be. The chances of it rupturing were low. So. But that was. That was definitely my. My every thought.
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B
So the first. First surgery was in 2011, in 2013.
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C
Yeah.
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B
You go in for another scan, you're in New York at this point, and they say, you know what, let's get rid of this thing now. It's gotten bigger, easy peasy. We'll go in. It'll be no problem.
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C
Yeah, they just. They were like, we'll make it so comfortable for you. Come on in. It'll be two hours in surgery. We'll keep you overnight just to keep an eye on you. Everything's gonna be hunky dory.
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B
And again, they go in through the femoral artery, not through the. And you wake up from the procedure and you are told, yeah, so they.
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C
They woke me up because they legally have to. I was actually in an operating room, I remember, and according to my parents, I was just screaming. Just wouldn't stop screaming.
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B
From pain.
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C
From pain. Because they woke me up to say that the coils had got stuck, which is a risk factor when you're doing these. You know, no surgery is 100%. So I had had a much bigger bleed. And so they had to wake me up to say, listen, we have to put you into open brain surgery. We have to cut your head open and save your life. But we have to let you know that we're doing that, and we need your verbal consent. So I remember my mum and my dad in the corner of the room and my mum just being like, it's going to be all right. Yeah, you can say yes. You can say yes, it's okay. And. And obviously that, you know, you know, reading you your you might die thing. So I go back under, and the story is my mum tells it is because the first operation was about eight hours, and then this operation was another five, I think. So I'm in the. The second operation is happening, and. And they come down and they're like, we really. We really don't think she's gonna make it. We really, really think she's gonna die because the bleed is huge. So then they come down and say to my mum, she's alive. But she's absolutely brain damaged. When, when, when blood doesn't get to a part of your brain, it literally in that moment will just stop working. And so they were like, we don't know, we don't know what part of the brain it is, but that's gone. And then they come down half an hour later and go, woohoo. The, the blood has found very, very, very quickly found another way to get around this. And so whatever this bit of her brain is, that's gone. We've had a real look and we don't really know what, what abilities it might be. It might be her concentration, it might be her peripheral vision, it might be, as I like to joke, her taste in men, but, but she's alive and she, you know, the major parts of her brain that could have been damaged have not by some miracle. And then, and then, and then I, and then I wake up.
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B
Now the recovery you describe in the pieces is even worse than last time. More pain, more prolonged, and it goes on quite a long time. But do you recognize in yourself any deficits other than joking around about taste in men?
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C
So in the beginning, when I was still at hospital, they asked me to draw a clock and I couldn't. I thought I was drawing it perfectly, but I had drawn it the wrong way around. And I just. The, the overriding thing that happened immediately after this one, that was different to the first one, I couldn't look anyone in the eye, including my parents.
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B
Why is that?
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C
I think blind fear, because it felt like a bit of me was just gone forever and I didn't know who would be looking back. I don't know if that makes any sense, but it kind of did.
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B
You sense in the eyes of others when you were looking at them or hard as it was, that they were terrified for you or were. Yeah, sure, yeah.
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C
I remember my dad saying to my mum later, he was like, there was a minute there, I thought she was bipolar. I was so extreme in my, in my emotions at that time. Those first three weeks were just pure turmoil, just scared. And I think I kind of exited the building as it were, just from complete fear of just not knowing what, who I was, what, what was going on, the fact that I couldn't trust my mind. I think there's an innate fear in yourself that you have that if, if that doesn't work and if that could go wrong again, then what am I, how can I operate? How can I in any way exist in this world if I can't trust that my brain is, is everything I.
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B
Think it is probably an impossible question to answer, but how do you feel that you're a different person or different in any way now than you might have been, having not gone through this double crisis?
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C
It's funny, I didn't finish thinking, woo hoo, carpe diem, let's jump off the cliff and do all the let's do the bucket list. Now. I had the exact opposite. I thought I was gonna die every day. So I just feel more aware. Of what? Of the smorgasbord, of things that life has to offer you, be it, you know, dragon riding fame, or be it life threatening brain damage. I feel that it's taken me, you know, this amount of time to fully appreciate all that lies in between those two things.
- [18:13]
B
Emilia Clarke, thank you so much and good luck to you.
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C
Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks.
- [18:23]
B
You can read Emilia Clarke's essay@newyorker.com the last season of Game of Thrones premieres in April. I'm David Remnick and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for right now. We've got a new episode of the podcast up every Friday and Tuesday@newyorkerradio.org or wherever you get your podcasts.
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A
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Toon Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. Our team includes Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Kao Alia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix and Stephen Valentino, with help from Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment, Sam.