One of the first scenes in Game of Thrones is a young, naked Emilia Clarke standing front on to the camera in her role as Daenerys Targaryen, setting a precedent for what would continue on throughout the series. Now, a decade on, the British actress, who was 23 when she started filming GoT‘s first season, has revealed she would be in tears before shooting certain “terrifying” nude scenes.
During her appearance on Dax Shepard’s podcast Armchair Expert, the actress said, “I took the job and then they sent me the scripts and I was reading them, and I was like, ‘Oh, there’s the catch!’
“But I’d come fresh from drama school and I approached it as a job,” she continued. “I’ve never been on a film set like this before. I’d been on a film set twice before then, and I’m now on a film set completely naked with all of these people, and I don’t know what I’m meant to do, and I don’t know what’s expected of me, and I don’t know what you want, and I don’t know what I want.”
She continued: “Regardless of there being nudity or not, I would have spent that first season thinking I’m not worthy of requiring anything, I’m not worthy of needing anything at all… Whatever I’m feeling is wrong, I’m gonna cry in the bathroom and then I’m gonna come back and we’re gonna do the scene and it’s gonna be completely fine.”
Clarke went on to say that Jason Momoa, who played her on-screen husband, Khal Drogo, for the show’s first season, made her feel more comfortable and looked out for her during hard scenes.
“He was crying more than I was,” Clarke said of Momoa during the scene where Drogo rapes Daenerys on their wedding night. “It’s only now that I realise how fortunate I was with that, because that could have gone many, many, many different ways,” she continued. “Because Jason had experience – he was an experienced actor who had done a bunch of stuff before coming on to this – he was like, ‘Sweetie, this is how it’s meant to be, this is how it’s not meant to be, and I’m going to make sure that that’s the fucking gaze.’ He was always like, ‘Can we get her a fucking robe? She’s shivering!’ … He was so kind and considerate and cared about me as a human being.”
Clarke, now 33, says that post-Game of Thrones she’s been pressured to go nude in other roles so as not to “disappoint” fans.
“I’ve had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up’, and they’re like, ‘You don’t wanna disappoint your Game of Thrones fans’. And I’m like, ‘Fuck you’.”
“I’m a lot more savvy [now] with what I’m comfortable with, and what I am okay with doing,” she said.
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