Read the full transcript of actress Emilia Clarke’s interview on How to Fail podcast with host Elizabeth Day, May 13, 2026.
Editor’s Notes: In this captivating episode of the How to Fail podcast, host Elizabeth Day welcomes internationally acclaimed actress Emilia Clarke to share her profound journey through fame and personal hardship. Best known as the Mother of Dragons in Game of Thrones, Clarke opens up about experiencing “imposter syndrome times a million” and the immense pressure of sudden stardom. She speaks candidly about surviving two life-threatening brain aneurysms during her 20s, exploring how these shattering experiences ultimately forced her to redefine recovery and self-care. Through moving stories about her beloved late father and the lessons hidden within her perceived failures, Clarke delivers an inspiring, authentic, and beautifully vulnerable conversation.
TRANSCRIPT:
ELIZABETH DAY: Welcome to How to Fail, the podcast that believes, as James Joyce once said, that failures are the portals of self-discovery. Before we get into this episode, please do remember to like, follow, and subscribe so that you never miss a single conversation.
Emilia Clarke was 3 when she sat on her mother’s lap on the front row of the London Palladium watching a production of Showboat that her sound engineer father had worked on. She was, she recalled later, transfixed, and set her heart on becoming an actor. Almost 20 years later, her TV debut was a guest appearance on the BBC soap Doctors in 2009.
Then, at the age of 23, Clarke was cast as Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, in HBO’s juggernaut fantasy series, Game of Thrones. She received 4 Emmy nominations across 8 seasons and became internationally famous, going on to star in films including Terminator Genisys, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and the romantic comedy, Me Before You.
On stage, she won critical acclaim for her magnetic performance as Nina in The Seagull in the West End. But the fact that she had been a complete unknown at the time of her Game of Thrones audition left Clarke feeling she had, in her words, “imposter syndrome times a million.”
It was not her only challenge. In 2011, just after filming had wrapped on the debut season, she suffered the first of two life-threatening brain aneurysms, a shattering experience that later led to her setting up the charity SameYou with her mother, Jenny. Clarke’s charity work in neurorehabilitation earned her an MBE in the 2024 Honours List.
Now she returns to our screens in Ponies, a Cold War spy series on Sky and NOW TV. Clarke stars as one of the two US Embassy secretaries in late 1970s Moscow who become CIA operatives after their husbands die in mysterious circumstances. Still yet to turn 40, that happens later this year, Clarke’s acting career has been one of notable highs. But she says, “If there’s anything else you can do, do that, because acting has to be the only thing you can do to commit to the levels of failure.” Emilia Clarke, welcome to How to Fail.
EMILIA CLARKE: Thank you so much.
ELIZABETH DAY: Well, you’re amongst friends here.
EMILIA CLARKE: Oh my God.
ELIZABETH DAY: Yeah.
EMILIA CLARKE: That was beautiful. Thank you.
ELIZABETH DAY: Thank you. Thank you for coming on How to Fail, but also, thank you for being such a supporter of this podcast from the very, very early days. It did not go unnoticed and it meant a lot. Good. I loved Ponies.
EMILIA CLARKE: Oh, good.
ELIZABETH DAY: It’s so good.
EMILIA CLARKE: Good. It’s fun.
ELIZABETH DAY: It’s so fun.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes.
ELIZABETH DAY: It feels so fresh.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes.
ELIZABETH DAY: It’s two female leads.
EMILIA CLARKE: That’s the thing. It’s two female leads and it’s not even— there’s like, it’s pure friendship. It’s just pure friendship. It’s not two female leads that are actually going to fall in love with each other. It’s just friends, just female friendship, which is the most important part of my life. And it’s amazing to be able to have a show and that being the main theme of it.
Ponies: The Hardest Job She’s Ever Done
ELIZABETH DAY: And you said that it’s the hardest job you’ve ever done.
EMILIA CLARKE: Oh, yeah. Which seems weird for all the really— I think maybe it’s the first time being honest about how hard jobs are. No, I’ve had some really horrible hard jobs. This was hard because this is the first time— I have a production company, and this is the first production that we are producing, that I was a producer and an actor in. The added little spicy thing that made it nearly impossible to do was the Russian.
ELIZABETH DAY: Yeah.
EMILIA CLARKE: I speak a lot of Russian. It’s incredible. I’m not a linguist.
ELIZABETH DAY: Incredibly impressive.
EMILIA CLARKE: Thank you very much. Took a lot of work.
ELIZABETH DAY: Did you learn Russian just for the script, or can you now speak it?
EMILIA CLARKE: I can speak those lines. What I do notice now is that when I’m walking around, I hear Russian in a way that I’ve never acknowledged before. You’re like, “Oh, I think I know what you’re saying.” Or watching The Americans, I’m like, “Ooh, I got that! I knew what they were saying.” But no, I definitely do not speak the language Russian.
ELIZABETH DAY: And how did you learn the lines? You had a very specific technique, didn’t you?
The Memory Palace Technique
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes. I mean, we’re saying I, I mean Fabien, my incredible teacher for this. And he and I built a process that was like a 6-step process, which involves visualization, it involves a memory palace. But it also involves writing stories that then you put into the memory palace. So you have a Russian line and each word broken into its syllables, paw, let’s say that’s one of the sounds in one of the words in one of the sentences.
Then you put that story in a space. This is all in your mind, in a space that you know very well. And so you walk in and you see in your mind’s eye the action happening, in these very specific parts of the room, and then you’ve learned it.
ELIZABETH DAY: That’s fascinating.
EMILIA CLARKE: Wild. The real outtakes is me just swearing profusely every time I mess it up.
ELIZABETH DAY: Do you have a similar technique for learning lines in English?
EMILIA CLARKE: No, I’m very lucky in that now they just go in. People ask, like, “How do you learn my lines?” You just do it. You just— Yeah, I definitely— It’s that one part of my brain that muscle is just really well flexed. Like, it just, it just goes in.
On Failure and the Acting Industry
ELIZABETH DAY: Before we get into your specific failures, yes, that quote that I ended the introduction on, that idea that you have, it has to be the thing that you do, has to. What were some of the failures that you were thinking of when you said that?
EMILIA CLARKE: Oh, just every job you didn’t get, every comparison you make of yourself and someone else, every time you think, oh, I did something that felt good. I took the right job. I had the right experience. People are saying lovely things. And then you look and you’re like, but I should have done that. And that’s amazing. And this now looks not good.
It’s kind of a life of— it’s asking— I think the industry is— life, the world, everyone, this is not just for actors, is asking you to compare yourself to other people and asking you to compare where you are at. Unlike in any other job, an actor’s trajectory is not built upon, you know what I mean?
ELIZABETH DAY: Yes.
EMILIA CLARKE: So you start at the— in the mailroom at CAA, an American agency for actors, and then within 15 years you should be a fully fledged agent with a really impressive client list. As an actor, you start with one job and then you go to the left and you go to the right and then you— doesn’t work out and then this doesn’t work. You’re not guaranteed to keep going up.
ELIZABETH DAY: And you have to prove yourself every time.
EMILIA CLARKE: Every single time. You have to reprove yourself every single time.
Failure One: Maths
ELIZABETH DAY: We’re going to get into your failures now because they’re so great.
EMILIA CLARKE: Thanks.
ELIZABETH DAY: And Emilia Clarke is an incredibly chic person. And you’ve given me very chic failures. Because they were one word each, but within each word, I’m just so excited about the stories that they are going to contain. Your first failure, we start slightly softer. Your first failure is maths. Yeah.
EMILIA CLARKE: I could have just put numbers. I could have just, yeah, maths and numbers. I just can’t do it. There’s this word for being essentially dyslexic with numbers. Yes.
ELIZABETH DAY: I think that’s dyscalculia.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes. My dad was a just a genius level maths, like just the smartest man ever. My brother, the same, like crazy clever. And I was kind of always the thick one in the family, the dummy. And it all really began with maths. My dad would test me on my times tables and I would just cry. It sort of became this like, pinnacle of unintelligence, which followed me throughout my whole school career.
To the point where when I’m on stage doing The Seagull in the West End, and Tom Rhys Harris, the cheeky little bugger, we’re talking about prime numbers, and it’s scripted, and we have our lines, and he decides to change it one night because he thinks it’s funny. And he looks at me, and he goes white because I’ve gone white. I’m crying. And he runs out, “I’m so sorry. Like, I saw you crumble. I didn’t mean to do that.” I think he then riffed for me, but it’s like this constant—
ELIZABETH DAY: Fear.
EMILIA CLARKE: Fear. Like a deep, yeah, like a fear of numbers, but which feels like a colossal failure.
ELIZABETH DAY: So interesting. I feel I can relate to this. I similarly had a thing with my dad who is terrifically intelligent and an amazing scientist.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes.
ELIZABETH DAY: You know, he’s retired now, but he’s a surgeon. Amazing.
EMILIA CLARKE: And he hoped.
ELIZABETH DAY: Yes. And he used to try and teach me.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes.
ELIZABETH DAY: And I felt so bad that I was not living up to what I perceived to be his expectation of me. So I was letting him down.
EMILIA CLARKE: Exactly. Yes.
ELIZABETH DAY: Did you have that aspect?
EMILIA CLARKE: 100%. Yeah. I could see it in my dad, like, why aren’t you getting it? And my dad was an incredibly sensitive, kind, loving, gorgeous man. You rarely saw him cross. But I knew in that moment in the back of the car of just going, I can’t get past— I have done something wrong here. This is wrong that I can’t do it because it’s something that’s so simple for him to do and I just could never get there.
And the more you avoid it, the bigger they become. Yes. And then you end up pulling pints in a bar in Hackney between the days before Game of Thrones when I’d just come out of drama school, and I lost them money. I lost the bar money because people would give me a 20, and I would probably give that right back.
ELIZABETH DAY: Yeah.
EMILIA CLARKE: You know? I’d given them 6 drinks, and the fear of not being able to— Calculate.
A Childhood Transfixed by Theatre
ELIZABETH DAY: Talk to me a little bit about young Emilia and this transfixed moment you had when you went to see Showboat, age 3. Did you literally want to be an actor from that age?
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah. How wonderful. I know, wild. It sort of just sounds really precocious and obnoxious, but I think with my dad in the theater, I was aware of that job earlier than someone else would’ve been. I used to watch Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison in—
ELIZABETH DAY: My Fair Lady.
Early Life and the Love of Performance
EMILIA CLARKE: In My Fair Lady. I used to watch that daily for 4 years, I think. Fast forward through all of Rex’s bits. I’m not— him in the library? Nope. Not interested in you, bruv. But that whole story had me transfixed.
And I just, I remember being at school and we had put on, they were putting on a play and this was baby school. This was like before, I mean, I must’ve been 5 and I didn’t realize it at the time, but the teacher had us stand in a line and she gave us a paragraph to say out loud. I now see that that was my first audition, which is crazy that she made us audition. Really weird.
And then she said, “Okay, that’s the part that you’ll play.” And I remember I ran out of the school gates and said to my mom, “I did it. I got the part.” And she was like, “What are you talking about? What do you mean?” And that feeling of succeeding and getting the part, and then I’m stood on stage in front of, at that time, it felt like 1,000 people. And I just felt really comfortable. And I forgot my lines and I just stood and looked out into the audience and just smiled. We got it all on camera of me just going. And very at ease, very, very at ease.
ELIZABETH DAY: You felt aligned, maybe.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah.
ELIZABETH DAY: You felt perfect.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah, with all eyes on me.
Losing Her Father
ELIZABETH DAY: Yeah. I find it very moving that this failure has led us to talk about your dad.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah.
ELIZABETH DAY: And I wonder if subconsciously or consciously, maybe that’s why you chose it.
EMILIA CLARKE: Maybe. Yeah.
ELIZABETH DAY: Because your dad died in 2016.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah. 10 years this year.
ELIZABETH DAY: I’m so sorry.
EMILIA CLARKE: Thank you. It’s the worst. It’s— I’ve had 2 brain hemorrhages. I’ve had Game of Thrones and nothing. There is nothing worse. It’s the single most transformative thing that’s ever happened. Definitely, definitely.
It’s this thing where when I find, and when I meet women who’ve also lost their fathers, the thing that happened that I didn’t, that I had no, that you can never predict or understand. It feels like the safety net in the world has gone, but it’s a safety net you didn’t know was there. And it was just unfathomable. I’m a relentlessly optimistic person, and it was unfathomable that that could happen. And it took me years to just comprehend it, the finality of it, the enormity of it.
And we just weren’t prepared. And it wasn’t— at no point did anyone say, “Your dad’s dying of cancer.” It was just like, “Oh, this is wrong with him, and then this is wrong with him, and then this is wrong with him.” And he’d had this cancer diagnosis, and I was away, I was filming.
And I went back. I’ll tell you my spooky story about this. So I was filming this tiny movie that barely even got released because I wanted to, I really wanted to do it. And I remember leaving and then being like, should I be leaving? And my mom being like, your father’s a professional. Kill you if you didn’t do this job.
So I was doing it in Kentucky, which is like a 22-hour door-to-door journey. And I got some— we got the call that said— first of all, I had the call of your father’s going into an operation that he might not live through. Talk to him on the phone, not pleasant. He survived that. And then I got the call saying, “You have to come back home.”
So I got the flights back home, and he was in a coma, and I sat with him for 3 days. And then my job was like, “We can’t continue filming if you don’t come home.” And my mum again was like, “It’s 2 weeks. You’ve got 2 weeks left. Just go. Just go back.” So I went back, and then woken up in the middle of the night. It’s time, you got to come back.
So I didn’t tell anyone, I just left. And the whole flight from Kentucky, two flights, Kentucky to New York, New York to London, I didn’t have, I didn’t know. But when I landed in New York, my mom was like, he’s asking you to hurry. He was sort of like doing this and this whole time you’re like, I need this flight to move quicker.
And I’ll never forget, I got on the flight to New York and do you remember the days of satellite phones?
ELIZABETH DAY: Yes.
A Butterfly and a Goodbye
EMILIA CLARKE: So this was 2016. There wasn’t Wi-Fi, the Wi-Fi either didn’t exist in planes at that point, probably didn’t. And I asked them, I was like, do you have a satellite? And they were like, what are you talking about? Of course we don’t. And I was like, okay. Okay, so I’m just going to be sitting on this flight for like 10 hours and I can’t contact anyone. Oh my God, how do I even, I can’t, this is really difficult.
So I was sat there and I just knew I needed to calm myself down. So I was like, what can I do? I’m going to do a thought experiment. I’m going to imagine that I’m in the hospital. How, what could get into a hospital? A bird is too big. They would know that there was a bird in the hospital. Forget the bird, a butterfly. A butterfly can be in a hospital.
And so I imagine that I’m flying around the hospital and I’m like making sure that the doctors are going to do a really good job. And I’m fluttering around my dad being like, I’m coming, I’m coming home, I’m coming, I’m coming. Like, hold on, you’re going to be fine.
And then I somehow fall asleep and in a dream, I’m in the dream and I’m in my airline seat and my dad’s hospital bed is next to me and he just turns and said, “I just came to say goodbye.”
And I land and my mom sends me a text saying, don’t rush. So I knew that he’d passed and he passed at the time that I was having the dream. And then I get there and I see, I spend time with his body, which just, you know, I was there with my dad, my mom and my brother have been in the hospital for days and we open the house and this butterfly is flying around the room.
Oh my God. So now I just see my dad in butterflies everywhere and every summer, which, ’cause he passed away in July, it’s just, I don’t know. I just feel so strongly that what happens after we die, we don’t know. But one thing’s for certain is that we go back into the world. We go back into the world. My father was cremated and he is everywhere. Yes, he’s absolutely everywhere.
ELIZABETH DAY: That is so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. And this is the extent of my scientific knowledge is that we are made up of atoms. This is where science and spirituality meet.
EMILIA CLARKE: Man, my dad was a deeply spiritual yet deeply scientific man. He deeply believed in black holes. And I’m like, that’s where you are.
ELIZABETH DAY: Yeah.
EMILIA CLARKE: We’re in a parallel, you’re in a parallel universe. I miss him every single day, and I know that he— the only good thing about having someone that you love pass away is that every good thing that ever happens, you know it’s them. And I feel that. Yes. I really, really feel that.
ELIZABETH DAY: Thank you so much. He sounds like a wonderful person, and I hope you’re going to be kind to yourself in July.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes. Yes. No, we always do something, or at least, you know, if we’re not all together, we’ll always try and do something. Sometimes it’s just going to the pub and raising a pint because he liked beer. Yeah. Making sure I drink my beer.
ELIZABETH DAY: Beer and butterflies. What a legend. Beer and butterflies.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
The Second Failure: Recovery
ELIZABETH DAY: This sort of brings us onto your second failure.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah.
ELIZABETH DAY: Which is recovery.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah.
ELIZABETH DAY: And I know a little about this because of our mutual friend, Clemency Burton-Hill. Yes. Who went through a brain aneurysm. And the process of recovery was very long and challenging. It was a really big thing to go through. And she had a near-death experience that was a sort of visceral, it was a visceral thing that she went through. And I wonder whether you ever experienced something similar, whether that changed your attitude. No.
EMILIA CLARKE: So this is why I have recovery as a failure. Yeah. 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, and February, I was in the gym doing a plank and had my first brain hemorrhage. And then spent the next 2 weeks with my agent trying to not tell HBO until they knew I wouldn’t die.
So, the first 2 weeks after a brain injury, if you’re not clearly severely mentally disabled or in a coma or whatever it might be, that’s the— they’re just waiting for something to go wrong. They’re waiting for it to get worse. I was in A&E until they worked out what was wrong with me. And then I went to a different hospital and they were plugging me in and I just kept trying to say like, I’ve got to go to work. Like, I can’t be here. How long is this going to take? And they’re like, 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.
ELIZABETH DAY: Bloody hell, Emilia.
EMILIA CLARKE: 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 2.
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.
ELIZABETH DAY: So, if you don’t mind going back to that moment when you were doing a plank in a gym in North London.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah.
ELIZABETH DAY: What is the first feeling that you get?
The First Aneurysm: A Terrifying Morning at the Gym
EMILIA CLARKE: I have to preface this with the night before I’d had this horrible headache and I just felt restless and anxious and stressed. I remember it really clearly being like, I don’t feel good in my brain and body. And I was staying at my parents’ and then I’d got the train to London and was just like, oh, got this weird headache in the back of my neck. Right round in the back. Didn’t think anything of it because I get— I got headaches quite a lot.
And then I arrived at the gym and was like— like, we’ve all had those days where you’re at the gym going, I mean, I’d rather be anywhere else. Like, this is really hard. And it felt particularly difficult, but I was in a mode of beating myself up. So you’re like, come on, we’re doing this, we’re going to do it. So I arrived incredibly tired. And we were doing the plank. And then the closest thing to describe it is imagine an elastic band just snapping around your brain, this insane pressure.
And I stopped and he was like, where does it hurt? And I said, my head. And my trainer was like, that’s not good. And then everything feels like a blur. I crawled to the loo. And was just vomiting profusely with this unbearable headache. And in that moment, I knew I was being brain damaged. Something clicked. Tomorrow’s World, I don’t know, someone somewhere had said, “If you’re throwing up and you have a headache, that’s bad. That’s really bad.”
So, I started wiggling my fingers and toes, and I started going through all the lines from the show. And I just kept saying to myself, “I’m an actor,” ’cause I’d just got my dream job. So I just kept saying this kind of mantra over and over and over and over again. And then someone, and I don’t know who, ’cause I was really coming in and out of consciousness, someone obviously heard me, called an ambulance. Someone else found my phone. Back in the day when your phone didn’t need to be unlocked by your eyeballs. And they called my mum and they got me in an ambulance.
And then my parents, by the time I’d got to hospital, my parents walked past because I was in the hallway. It was a very busy London hospital, which at this point we’re now at like on a Saturday night. And my parents walked past me because they didn’t recognize me. When you’re in so much pain, there’s just— and they were waiting to figure out what was wrong with me, so they couldn’t really give me any drugs. So I was just in excruciating amounts of pain.
And then they put us in this little room and the nurse on duty, the nurse on the night duty that came on, her husband was a brain surgeon and she was like, has anyone given you a brain scan? ‘Cause no one knew what was wrong. No one. They were like, this girl’s on drugs, which often happens if you’re a young person and you’re having a stroke or you’re having a brain bleed of any kind. People will assume it’s drugs.
ELIZABETH DAY: Oh my goodness.
EMILIA CLARKE: And then I got rushed to a specialist hospital.
ELIZABETH DAY: Thank you so much for telling that story because I imagine it costs you something every time you tell it and you go back there.
EMILIA CLARKE: I definitely go back there, yeah.
The Second Aneurysm: When Surgery Goes Wrong
ELIZABETH DAY: Yes. You then have another aneurysm.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes. So yeah, I thought that I was doing really well and everything was brilliant and I was doing a terrible play on Broadway, but I was living in New York.
ELIZABETH DAY: Yeah.
EMILIA CLARKE: And I was having the time of my life and had this cute little studio apartment and everything was wonderful. And I was coming to the end of the show and the end of my SAG medical.
ELIZABETH DAY: Yeah. So SAG, Screen Actors Guild, it’s the union medical that you have when you are acting in America.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes. And I was like, “Ooh, I need a brain scan.” ‘Cause at that point I was having a brain scan every 6 months because basically they saw when they fixed the first one, they saw that I had a second aneurysm.
ELIZABETH DAY: Right.
EMILIA CLARKE: ‘Cause they often come in clusters or— what we call mirror aneurysms, which is basically when your brain is being formed, it’s one cell and there might be a weakness on one artery. And as the cell grows and turns into the two sides of your brain, that weakness is separated equally onto both sides. So I had this one that ruptured and they were like, there’s this smaller one, but it’s too small to operate on. So we’re just going to keep an eye on it and it’s going to be fine.
And I went and got the brain scan and the doctors in America said, hey lady, we’ve got to do something about this. It’s got like 3 times bigger in the last 6 months. It’s going to be a really quick operation. Just going to be in and out, in overnight. That’s it. It’s going to be totally fine. You’re in really good hands. My mum and dad flew over for it and I remember counting down with the anesthetic. And I was just like, I had just had a terrible feeling.
And then the next thing I remember is them waking me up and having that fit, that pain all over again, because they had— they were like, we’re going to crack— we— it went wrong, we have to crack— we have to cut your head open and we have to have your permission. And then I remember, all I remember is I’m lying on the gurney and I can see my mum and dad like over there. And I can just remember my mum’s head nodding, going, “Say yes.”
It had just gone wrong in surgery. If you imagine like a bubble, you’ve got your vein, and then this is just like a weakness — as the blood pumps round, it turns into this little bubble that’s filled with blood. And as your blood pressure gets more, the pressure on that becomes so great. So if it ruptures, they fill it, to simply stop that so there’s not blood blowing into your brain. And I think they just filled it a bit too much, so that caused a tear. So then they had to cut my head open and clamp it, and then that’s a bit more secure. But it was quite a big bleed.
And the only— I have no memories of anything. I didn’t have any spiritual awakening or anything, but my parents were waiting for me and the doctors would just come down every half an hour going, we think she’s going to die. No, we think she’s blind. No, we think she’s going to be paralyzed. No, every half an hour they’re just trying to work out what parts of my brain were going and how they were trying to save me. And my mum says that she felt a bright light and she knew that everything was going to be okay. And then they came down and said, “She’s fine.” So that’s pretty wild.
Recovery: Relearning and Shutting Down
ELIZABETH DAY: So I know this from Clemmie, whose initial recovery I was there for some of it. She had to— she was in a coma for 17 days and then had to relearn how to walk and talk. Did you have to relearn?
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah. That happened. The first one, not at all. The second one, when you’re in America has stronger drugs. I was on OxyContin and Percocets way back before anyone knew that those words were bad. There was a lot of pain medication. Speech and movement came, but it was a process. Nothing like Clemmie.
ELIZABETH DAY: Mm-hmm.
EMILIA CLARKE: The biggest thing that happened to me with the second brain hemorrhage was I shut down emotionally.
ELIZABETH DAY: Right.
EMILIA CLARKE: And it became this thing where I just couldn’t look anyone in the eye. When you have a brain injury, you move around in the world. And for me, what happened after the first and specifically after the second, I was just convinced that I had cheated death and I was meant to die. And that every day, that’s all I could think about. So it was the opposite of like, “I survived, I feel great.” And it was this like, “I’m not meant to be here. This is going to come and get me.”
And that, it just cuts you off from being able to engage with the outside world because you are walking around knowing that your body has failed you, your brain has failed you. This thing that you know to be where yourself, your perception of yourself lies, has failed you, and no one else can see it. So, you become very sensitive.
And then I’ll never forget, we went to Comic-Con again, like literally 6 weeks later, I’m promoting the show.
ELIZABETH DAY: 6 weeks after the operation that you’ve just described?
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes.
ELIZABETH DAY: Okay. So, sorry, I don’t want to interrupt. No, no, no, at all. For anyone who’s listening to this rather than watching on YouTube, my expression is one of shock and admiration in a way.
EMILIA CLARKE: Thank you. It was helpful. Without my work, I don’t know what I would’ve done. The repercussions that I had as a result of my brain injury are all things hilariously that I’ve only just fixed, that I was quite happy living with. Not happy, but you know, okay, it’d be fine. Like, it wasn’t debilitating to the point where I can’t walk or I can’t speak, or I used to think my ability to act had gone. Definitely don’t have any maths now.
And so we were promoting the show. We were at San Diego Comic-Con. It’s wild, it’s crazy. And I started getting a headache. And anytime I got any kind of headache, I was like, that’s it, it’s happening, it’s happening again. And I was getting this headache and my publicist was like, right, we’ve got to go do this live interview with MTV. And I was like, I think I’m going to die. I think it’s happening. And she was like, I mean, what do you say to that?
And in my head I was like, if I’m going to die, I’ll do it on live TV. Let’s go. There is no other option, which was after each, I was blessed that after each of my brain injuries, in my mind, there was no other option but to carry on. I was raised by a family that did not partake in pity. Self-pity was not on the table. It’s not how we operated.
And one of the deepest cuts of having the second brain hemorrhage was that I was like, that’s not very fair. Why did I have to have another one? Like that. And that thought felt like going backwards.
Loss of Trust and Choosing Recovery as a Failure
ELIZABETH DAY: Gosh, you must have lost faith in so— lost trust in so much.
EMILIA CLARKE: In myself.
ELIZABETH DAY: Yes.
EMILIA CLARKE: That being the biggest issue. Yes. That’s what it does.
ELIZABETH DAY: And is that why you’ve chosen recovery as a failure?
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes, because I didn’t. I didn’t do any of the things. I did not take care of myself. I did not give myself any grace. I did not give myself any encouragement, or I didn’t glean any courage from it. I didn’t give myself any kindness, any. Everything was like, you failed.
I remember calling David and Diane after the second one and being like, I was like, “Lol. Happened again. Don’t worry, though. Don’t write me out of the show. I’m good. I’m going to be fine.” And they were sweet and lovely and kind and obviously like, “Oh my God, are you okay?” But in my mind, I’m like, “That means that you don’t think I can do my job.”
And again, we are talking about a time when there weren’t a lot of young women in big shows. Hell, there weren’t a lot of shows. This was the beginning of prestige TV. Not the beginning, obviously. Sopranos was the beginning. But, you know, the— Tomorrow’s World was the beginning.
ELIZABETH DAY: Love that reference. Love that reference.
EMILIA CLARKE: So good, the baby in the water. Yes. Yeah.
ELIZABETH DAY: You were so brilliant in Game of Thrones.
EMILIA CLARKE: Thanks.
ELIZABETH DAY: You don’t need me to tell you that, but I am going to tell you that. You really, you really were.
EMILIA CLARKE: Thank you.
The F* It Forties and Finding Peace with Recovery
ELIZABETH DAY: But I’m very interested in this idea of people pleasing being taken to its extreme.
EMILIA CLARKE: Literally, it’s extreme. I am dawning on the era where that is behind me. It’s taken me a number of years to get there, but this was like height. Yes, peak people pleasing time. I tried to keep as much familiarity around me as I could, and I think looking back, it’s probably a reaction to having been so ill.
ELIZABETH DAY: Where are you in your recovery now? Has that omnipresent fear of it happening again, has that gone?
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes, that kind of, that left me a couple of years after the second one, I think. One morning you wake up and you’re like, oh, haven’t had that thought in a while. Whereas before, I would say to my hair and makeup team, or I would say to whatever job I was on, I would take people that I trusted and liked that were going to be up in my face. I’m going to think I’m having a brain hemorrhage quite a lot. I’m not. And they’re like, I don’t know, you want to give me that? Do you want me to hold that? What if you are? It’s this sort of— it’s quite— fear is infectious.
And then, yeah. And then a couple of years after, I just realized that I wasn’t thinking about that anymore. And I get my brain checked all the time and it’s completely fine. But there were other things that I now know were, I’ve lived with the other as a result of a brain injury that only this year have I properly fixed, which is crazy. I run a charity, I’m doing this all day long. That’s where my failure of recovery, because I did everything wrong.
ELIZABETH DAY: Yes. And the things that you’ve only just fixed, are they the psychology of what you went through?
EMILIA CLARKE: Do you know about Ehlers-Danlos syndrome?
ELIZABETH DAY: I’ve heard of it. Yes.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah. So I have that. I’m on that spectrum, the hypermobile spectrum. There are things that are a repercussion of having that, MCAS being one of them, mast cell activation syndrome. Basically just means I have a very— I have a lot of inflammation because my body thinks it’s allergic to everything. I have this remarkable doctor in America, and he’s just fixed everything, and I feel great.
ELIZABETH DAY: Oh, I’m so happy for you.
EMILIA CLARKE: In a way that I didn’t realize how it could feel great, you know? Because you’re like, it’s fine. None of those things are interrupting my life to a massive degree.
ELIZABETH DAY: Well, may your forties be blessed. Oh my goodness. In my experience, it’s the best decade yet.
EMILIA CLARKE: Well, I do believe I’m entering the f* it forties.
ELIZABETH DAY: I feel like spiritually you’ve always been in your forties. She said, “Knowledgably not knowing.” But I feel like—
EMILIA CLARKE: An old soul.
ELIZABETH DAY: Yes, you’re going to love it. You’re going to love it.
EMILIA CLARKE: I’m excited.
Fame as a Failure: “I’m a Bad Celebrity”
ELIZABETH DAY: Okay, let’s get on to your final failure because I can’t wait to get into this with you. Fame.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah. I’m a bad celebrity. I suck at it. I just, I mean, I feel like everything that I’ve just been talking about just then is a contributing factor to it. But when you are dealing with fatigue after a brain injury, it’s real. I remember after the first one in the second season, I did my first filming day and I walked into my hotel room and I collapsed, and I woke up the next morning exactly where I’d fallen. Wow. You know, we’re not saving lives, but filming days can be 18 hours. You’re on your feet, it’s into acting, you know, it’s— I’m not trying to say that our job is more important than it is, but it can be taxing because you’re kind of wired and tired all the time.
ELIZABETH DAY: Can I just say, you have had two brain aneurysms, and that is one of the symptoms. It’s like overwhelming, crushing tiredness.
EMILIA CLARKE: Exactly.
ELIZABETH DAY: Because you’re kind of catching up with yourself and your brain is reimagining itself.
EMILIA CLARKE: But what it means is it meant that my ability to be social of an evening, or go to the party, or go to the event, or there’s this and there’s this, and then there’s this party afterwards, and then there’s that and there’s that, and there’s this afterwards, and then someone wants you here and someone wants you there. I had to make choices as to how many of those things I was able to do. People want to give you the wonderful hotel and want the free stuff, and I’m like, I don’t need much. In fact, too much I find a bit overwhelming.
I’ve had a few interviews or experiences before where people really want you to be a diva, and that is not me and never has been. And this sounds like a humble brag as I’m saying it out loud, but it’s— as a kid growing up wanting to be an actor, it wasn’t to be famous, it was to be creative and be an actor. And you sort of— sometimes I just found myself in certain rooms where I was just like, “I’m not meant to be here.” It feels like there was a conflict with your own authenticity.
ELIZABETH DAY: Yes.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes. Yes.
ELIZABETH DAY: So, do you think— was your perception that people were disappointed that you were too normal?
EMILIA CLARKE: I felt like a big fat loser.
ELIZABETH DAY: Oh, Emilia! I know! And that must have been strange as well because Game of Thrones, don’t know if you know this, it was kind of massive and got a lot of fans.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes, yes.
ELIZABETH DAY: And I know that you’ve had negative experiences with stalking, and I’m sure there was a lot that felt unmanageable and scary.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes, yes, yes.
Looking Back on Game of Thrones
ELIZABETH DAY: So was there a part of you that wanted to close yourself off from that too? How do you feel about Game of Thrones now?
EMILIA CLARKE: Oh, it’s a really good question. It changes all the time, changes every year. There’s distance there, so I can see it fully for all that it is. It was way too big for me to comprehend even a year after it happened. It was just— it’s like thinking about high school. That’s how I always describe it, because it was 10 years of my life. Those friendships and relationships that you have become like family in that, like, there was fighting and there was difficult times and it was wonderful times, but there was life. People got married, people got divorced, people got kids, you know. These enormous things happened.
And looking back on Game of Thrones, it’s— the enormity of it for me is a lived experience of what I felt filming it, a lived experience of what was reflected back to me when you meet fans, the, like, freakouts I’d get for being, in the last couple of years at least, so visible. As soon as I got recognised, I used to get panic attacks. I just couldn’t handle it really in that moment. And then you look back on it and you are sort of like, that was lightning in a bottle. My youth! That was, like, extraordinary. This extraordinary thing, and I was a part of it. And I— You know?
ELIZABETH DAY: Yes.
EMILIA CLARKE: The lived experience versus looking back on what you felt when you were filming it and what you see it to have been from a cultural point of view. And those two things are very far apart. So, I think it’s going to take me a few more years to try and marry them up.
ELIZABETH DAY: And have you watched House of the Dragon?
EMILIA CLARKE: No.
ELIZABETH DAY: No?
EMILIA CLARKE: That’s like going to, like, someone else’s high school reunion.
ELIZABETH DAY: Okay, right. Yes, got it. Okay. And are you still very good friends with Jason Momoa?
EMILIA CLARKE: I am. Yes. Beautiful Jason. Kit and Rose are my closest, though. They’re the ones that I see the most. Kit Harington played Jon Snow, and Rose Leslie, who is his actual wife, played Ygritte.
ELIZABETH DAY: That’s lovely that those friendships have maintained themselves.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes. Yeah.
On Being Recognised and Not Googling Yourself
ELIZABETH DAY: When you get people recognising you in the street, how does that feel and what do they say?
EMILIA CLARKE: It does not feel overwhelming anymore. Which is wonderful. And it feels lovely. You’re like, “Oh, just give me a little boost.” Yeah. “So nice. These people are being so nice to me.” I finally feel like I’m at a place in my career now where I’m like, I get it. Whereas I was so young, and I know I was in my 20s, but from an industry and work point of view, I was the most naive creature you could possibly imagine. I had no idea.
ELIZABETH DAY: You don’t Google yourself, do you?
EMILIA CLARKE: Hell no. So sitting in my hospital bed after the first brain injury, my dad was reading the newspaper. There was some article in it about the size of my bum. It was read to me, and it destroyed me. Completely destroyed me. I’m sure they were trying to be like, “Hey, look at that, a regular-sized butt on TV. How nice.” But that robbed me of any desire to ever read anything about myself, and I’ve never Googled myself. You know, Game of Thrones is a racy show. There’s a lot of comments. It’s a lot of stuff. I was a kid.
ELIZABETH DAY: Well, you started off this failure by saying that you are a failure as a celebrity. You’re not a very good celebrity.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah.
ELIZABETH DAY: Like, just not—
EMILIA CLARKE: I just didn’t— I guess some people are born for fame, you know? Get the free stuff, have a beautiful time, go to every party. And historically, that hasn’t been me. Now I’m like, hell yeah, party sounds fun, but because I feel good with it.
ELIZABETH DAY: Well, what I would like to say is that I think you are a very loved celebrity, actually. And because I have Googled you in preparation for this interview, I can reassure you, like, you don’t ever need to do it.
EMILIA CLARKE: Good.
ELIZABETH DAY: People love you.
EMILIA CLARKE: D’oh!
ELIZABETH DAY: And warm to you because they see your authenticity. And actually, the fact that you’ve been through all of this stuff and all of this struggle and retained the essence of who I feel you really are is such a testament to your strength of character, and it’s why I believe you are so loved.
EMILIA CLARKE: Thank you. It’s— that’s incredibly, incredibly kind. You spend your 20s and 30s trying to be somebody else, and then your 40s are the moment when you go back to who you actually are.
ELIZABETH DAY: That’s 100% been my experience.
EMILIA CLARKE: That’s how it feels right now. I feel now that I’m like, I don’t care. I’m just going to be exactly what I am. Don’t fight it.
A Superficial Note: The Famous Eyebrows
ELIZABETH DAY: This is going to be a slightly superficial note to end on.
EMILIA CLARKE: Excellent. I’m here for it.
ELIZABETH DAY: But I am a fellow eyebrows girl.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes. I love your brows.
ELIZABETH DAY: I literally had mine done especially for today. Oh, they look fabulous. I needed to come and bring my brow A-game.
EMILIA CLARKE: They look very good.
ELIZABETH DAY: And one of the things that you are loved for by the wider public, not just me, is your expressiveness and your eyebrows.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes.
ELIZABETH DAY: And is it true that your mother said to you once, don’t do drugs, don’t have sex, don’t do anything to your brows.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah, literally. She used to bribe me. She said when I was like, I want to be like Posh Spice and I want to get rid of— I just want to have the tiniest little eyebrows. She was like, let me just— I’m going to get you an appointment with an eyebrow specialist. Like, they existed, do you know what I mean? Like, that wasn’t around then. And she just kept being like, oh yeah, they’re busy, but we’re just going to— and just— and then forgot about it.
ELIZABETH DAY: That’s genius.
EMILIA CLARKE: Genius.
ELIZABETH DAY: Wise, wise woman.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah. Yeah.
Embracing Self-Knowledge
ELIZABETH DAY: But do you find it slightly absurd that we live in such a culture where a woman’s natural expressiveness is worthy of note in the public eye?
EMILIA CLARKE: Oh my God. I— It breaks my heart that that is where we are right now. Makes me very sad. Women should do whatever they want to do for themselves. To feel good and feel beautiful. But I do believe that we just are beautiful. You know, you just are. And the thing that I worry about is I think that one procedure can lead to another.
I remember it when I had— I went through a phase of having my, you know, the eyelash extensions. The ones that they like glue in permanently, like semi-permanent. And I started doing them, was like, oh my gosh, game changer. And my mum still got to a point where she was like, “Darling, you look like an elephant. This is outrageous.” And I couldn’t see how hooked I’d got on them.
ELIZABETH DAY: She couldn’t see, probably.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah, she couldn’t see. And then fall off it, get really skanky. I didn’t take care of them. But where does it end? I don’t want to judge anyone for making any choices about whatever makes them feel good, but I hope that they’re making the choices from a place of what they, you want, you know what I mean?
ELIZABETH DAY: Yes, from self-knowledge.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah.
ELIZABETH DAY: And I think in so many ways, that’s what this conversation has been all about. That self-knowledge that you’ve got back to, that you had when you were 3. Yes. And you went to Showboat.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes.
ELIZABETH DAY: And life is an unpacking back to that point.
EMILIA CLARKE: Yes.
ELIZABETH DAY: Emilia Clarke, it has been such a joy to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on How to Fail.
EMILIA CLARKE: Thank you for having me. Thank you.