The New Yorker Radio Hour - Emilia Clarke on a Near-Death Experience Scarier than “Game of Thrones”

Episode Date: March 22, 2019

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 sipping from a morphine bottle, and keeping the crisis a secret. “No one knows who the hell I am,” she recalls thinking. “I was a young girl who was given a huge opportunity. I did not for any reason want to give anyone a reason to think I was anything other than capable of fulfilling the duties they had given me. And I didn’t know what the show was at that moment. All I knew was I had a job.” Emilia Clarke wrote about her experience for the first time in an essay for newyorker.com. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. 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 Roynar and the First Men, Queen of Marine, Lady Regent of the Seven Kingdoms, breaker of chains, and mother of dragons. I'm talking, of course, about Dineris on HBO's Game of Thrones, played by Amelia Clark. I am De Nairus Stormborn, of House Targaryen, of the blood of old Valeria. I am the dragon's daughter, and I swear to you that those who would harm you will die screaming. 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 Amelia Clark 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. Well, I mean, it's so, it's so, 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 going to throw myself off. I'm going to throw myself off this building. And I feel the very, I feel the same about Game of Thrones. I feel like one day it's just going to come out because I can't keep it in anymore.

What happens if you give up the plot? Do the cops come and get you? I think so. I genuinely think that's what will happen. I think that the H.B. or Nightwalk is just going to turn up on my door and go, well, now it's time. Let me try a different tack then. Yeah, exactly. Wow. So in the first season, Dan Aris 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. That's season one. What was the most memorable part of that season? 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 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. really know what it was and, um, and we're all new. I mean, I was, I was a part of, I think as 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. Um, but um, there's, 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, because I kind of set myself a light a little bit.

You did. Because 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. Wait, you got, so you got, did you get, did you get burned? Well, I mean, so I walked into the fire and they, I just never forget everyone being like, stop! Because 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 get walking

because I thought someone would tell me You should not do that And I just never get There's this ring on my This metal ring on my costume And it just started to get Burning hot And then my costume was 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 And caught a lot And I was like oh I need to put that out Oh I'm in the middle of 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 within the moment. So, Amelia, the filming of this ends after the first season, you go home to London. Yes. You visit with your parents in Oxford. 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 going to work out with your trainer. And you're sitting there in a locker. room and you're overcome. What happens? Yeah, well, I've 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 a 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 I suddenly get this unbelievable pain that felt very much like an elastic, 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 DeathCon 5

I 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

there's so much pain. And you're completely alone in the bathroom. Nobody can hear you? 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 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 mom. 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 this being what this being a brain hemorrhage so I had bleeding on the brain so the surgery you had was not a craniotomy they did not open up skull, they go in through ephemeral artery.

Yes. 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. It took some hours. And then you wake up. What did the doctors tell you about your prognosis? 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 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. You're right that there's a kind of two-week barrier that you got to get past. And obviously you got past it. But after that, you experienced a real difficulty speaking or recalling your name.

What describe that? Because that must have been scary as hell. 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? Prime Minister, what's your name? And they woke me up at, you know, 2am 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. In fairness, you have a long name. 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, it, I couldn't make sense. And 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 relating to another human being. And in that moment, I felt if I can't communicate, I don't know how to do that.

In the New Yorker piece, you describe thinking that you are not going to make it and maybe that you don't want to. Yeah, it wasn't so much that I didn't think I was going to make it. It was that I wasn't prepared to make it. it was in that moment I asked them to just let me die, literally. It was one thing being, you know, having the bleed and getting over it and trying to figure what my life would be, but having that as a thing that I would have to live with for the rest of my life, in that moment I just, just wasn't ready to carry on. Why did you decide to keep this catastrophe secret?

Well, in the beginning, it was, season one, it was very, very, very. much no one knows who the hell I am. I really just, I don't want to cause, I'm going to 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. You were scared they were going to take it away from you? Yeah, I think I was scared they were going to take it away from me. I think I was also, I just didn't want to be a bother. Okay, that's the most English thing I've ever heard. You didn't want to be a bother after brain surgery. 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're given me. And I didn't even know what the show was at that point. All I knew is that I had a job. 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%. Well, HPA were A incredible.

It's only looking back now that I realize how kind and generous they were with me as I went to the photo shoots with my morphine bottle and straw. It was my first publicity shoot and they made it just, you know, well, we've got this room and you can just sit down

and actually this photo is just going to be lying down 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. So HBO knew, obviously, your family knew, but it's more or less a secret. You go back to film Season 2. You say in your essay that was your worst season of the 8. Why is that? Yeah.

It was such a, season one was such a hard act to follow for Dineris, his like as 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 going to die. And I didn't want to do that on set. 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.

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. 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 leave hospital, but then that other one on the other side becomes your every thought that maybe that's just going to rupture because who would, what would stop it 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 definitely my every thought. So the first surgery was in 2011, in 2013. Yeah. 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. 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 hour on you. Everything's going to be hunky-dory.

And again, they go in through the femoral artery, not through the head and you wake up from the procedure and you are told. Yeah, so 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. From pain. From pain because they woke me up to say that the coils had got stuck,

which is a risk factor when you're doing this, 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 obviously they're, you know, reading you'll, you might die thing. So I go back under and the story, as 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 second operation is happening, and they come down and they're like, we really, we really don't think she's going to make it. We really, really think she's going to die because the bleed is huge. So then they come down and say to my

mom, she's alive, but she's absolutely brain damaged. 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 what part of the brain it is, but that's gone. And then they come down half an hour later and go, woohoo, 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 abilities it might be.

It might be her concentration. It might be her peripheral vision. It might be, as I like to joke, her tasting men. 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 I wake up. Now, the recovery you describe in the piece is even worse than last time. More pain, more prolonged.

and it goes on quite a long time but do you recognise in yourself any deficits other than joking around about taste in men? 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 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. Why is that? 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 you sense in the eyes of others when you were looking at them, or how hard as it was, that they were terrified for you or were, yeah, sure. Yeah, I remember my.

dad saying to my mum later he was like there was a minute there I thought she was bipolar she I was so extreme in my um in my emotions at that time those first three weeks were just pure turmoil just scared and 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 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 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 everything I 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? It's funny, I didn't finish thinking, woohoo, Carpe Diem, let's jump off the cliff and do all the, let's do the bucket list now. Right. I had the exact opposite. I thought I was going to die every day. So I just feel more aware of what, of the smoggers board 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 this amount of time to fully appreciate all that lies in between those two things. Amelia Clark, thank you so much. And good luck to you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks. You can read Amelia Clark's essay at New Yorker.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 two. Tuesday at New Yorkerradio.org or wherever you get your podcasts. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato.

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