For a TV star on the come-up, the mid-2010s were Emilia Clarke’s Charlie Brown era. Sure, she had Game Of Thrones, where she starred as the Mother of Dragons, Daenerys Targaryen, but every foray into movies was like Lucy pulling the football. Her leaps into other franchises, Terminator: Genisys and Solo, resulted in two series-worst outings. That’s to say nothing of her go at Marvel in 2022, Secret Invasion. In between all that, Game Of Thrones flamed out spectacularly, leading to an Emmy night loss that took a lot of getting over.
Today, Clarke tells Variety that she’s “embarrassed to admit” how losing the Emmy to Jodie Comer for Killing Eve was a “significant thing.” “Everyone’s over Game Of Thrones now—you’re old news,” she thought to herself. The next morning, she admitted to herself that she had “a 13-year-old’s idea of success.” Her candor for those failures appears genuine in the self-deprecating way she discusses them. “Secret Invasion, I don’t think anyone liked that show, guys. I’m sorry! […] Star Wars? They didn’t like it. Terminator? That should never have happened. But these were jobs I said yes to, you know what I mean?” Clarke explains that she “entered into already existing franchises,” so she doesn’t take it personally when they don’t work out. She just needed to say “No” more often.
As for Game Of Thrones, she continues to defend her showrunners, Dave Benioff and D.B. Weiss (“geniuses”), who, “aside from what [she] brought as an actor,” didn’t give her any creative input on the character, “nor did [she] want any.” Clarke was too green to get in their way, and they were “fastidious about us saying the lines exactly as they’ve written them.” If she switched “it is” to “it’s,” they’d make her do another take. However, given the backlash to the season, it took her a while to come to terms with the initial phenomenon and blowback.
“I have gone through every circuitous route to get to the place that I am now, which is finally being able to be very grateful for everything that Game Of Thrones did and has given me,” she says. “I feel just really lucky that it happened to me — even luckier that I’ve had time to understand what that was, and now I feel firmly on the other side.”
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