Emilia Clarke says she was ashamed and didn't want to tell anyone about her brain aneurysm injury while portraying Daenerys Targaryen on ‘Game of Thrones’
“I wrapped the first season of Game of Thrones, wild experience. Biggest job of note, you know. I'd never done anything with America. I didn't really quite understand the level of what HBO was and could be. And clueless, but had the most incredible time. But it flipped my life upside down. So I was quite stressed. And we wrapped that in December. February, I was in the gym doing a plank and had my first brain hemorrhage and then spent the next two weeks with my agent trying to not tell HBO until they knew I wouldn't die.”
“So the first two weeks after a brain injury, if you're not clearly severely mentally disabled or in a coma or whatever it might be, they're just waiting for something to go wrong. They're waiting for it to get worse. It was in A&E until they worked out what was wrong with me. And then I went to a different hospital and they were, you know, plugging me in and I just kept trying to say like, I've got to go to work. Like I don't, like I can't be here. How long am I? How long is this going to take? And they're like, you've got, your brain is bleeding. It's going to take quite some time. So that took a long time for me to wrap my head around. But as soon as I left hospital, I had maybe, maybe a month and then I was doing press for the first season of Game of Thrones, still with a bit of morphine.”
“I was so ashamed that this thing had happened and that the people who had employed me might see me as weak or see me as something that could be broken. It was so like, I'm fine, I'm fine. And I was so young. And it was so all-consuming that any repercussions of the injury, I just absolutely ignored and tried my best to just like pretend like it didn't happen in order to get back to work, in order to keep working and be, you know, good. And then very quickly after that, we were doing season two.”
Elizabeth Day: “Did you tell anyone on Game of Thrones at all?”
Emilia Clarke: “No. I told David and Dan, the showrunners, because I felt it was like my duty to say, “I didn't die. So everything's fine, but just letting you know.” And they were obviously very kind and lovely, but it was not something I told a single soul because I just didn't want anyone to know.”
(Source: https://t.co/lOjSAOIepP)