Emilia Clarke, the actress who captivated the world as Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, has more to her story than fire-breathing dragons and epic battles.
Her journey is one of resilience, advocacy, and defying expectations. As she receives the prestigious Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to people with brain injuries, let's delve into the lesser-known chapters of her life.
In 2019, Emilia shared her aneurism battle with the New Yorker. Recalling the moment she suffered her first health injury while training at the gym, Emilia wrote: “On the morning of February 11, 2011, I was getting dressed in the locker room of a gym in Crouch End, North London, when I started to feel a bad headache coming on. I was so fatigued that I could barely put on my sneakers. When I started my workout, I had to force myself through the first few exercises.”
“Then my trainer had me get into the plank position, and I immediately felt as though an elastic band were squeezing my brain. I tried to ignore the pain and push through it, but I just couldn’t. I told my trainer I had to take a break. Somehow, almost crawling, I made it to the locker room. I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill. Meanwhile, the pain—shooting, stabbing, constricting pain—was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged.”
Emilia battled pain, stayed conscious, and recited Game of Thrones. A passerby helped her into recovery position. She has hazy memories of an ambulance and hospital.
She then recalled: “I was sent for an MRI, a brain scan. The diagnosis was quick and ominous: a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a life-threatening type of stroke, caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain. I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture. As I later learned, about a third of SAH patients die immediately or soon thereafter. For the patients who do survive, urgent treatment is required to seal off the aneurysm, as there is a very high risk of a second, often fatal bleed. If I was to live and avoid terrible deficits, I would have to have urgent surgery.”
Emilia was worried about having surgery before filming new episodes of Game of Thrones. After three hours of surgery, she woke up feeling alarmed because she couldn't remember her own name, sparking fear about her career.
Emilia confesses she may have been slightly ingenuous in terms of the nude scenes she had to endure. She told Sky News in 2019: "I took the job and then they sent me the scripts and I was reading them and it was like, 'Oh, there's the catch!’”