A valley sprawls before her, rich with every color of green in the kingdom, reaching out to a twinkling city, which borders the infinite sea. Her hair (tinted not with peroxide, but tiny flecks of actual gold) glows with a radiance that makes the setting sun so jealous it hides behind the surrounding mountains, and the evening sky blushes. She is Daenerys Targaryen, Queen of the Andals, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea. Everything in sight belongs to her.
Just kidding! She is Emilia Clarke, sitting high above Beverly Hills in a glass mansion rented for a magazine cover shoot. So high up that passing aircraft rattle the bones of the house and those inside it. So high up that you can see Santa Catalina Island in the distance, peeking out from behind a curtain of fog. She laughs about something the makeup artist says, and the last of the evening light bounces off of her cheekbones and shoots into the camera lens.
We are in the sky to talk about Clarke’s reign as one of the most preeminent television actresses of our time, as Daenerys on Game of Thrones. But first, I have a few questions about her abandoned career as a jazz singer.
Clarke’s default emotion is joy — her resting heart rate seems to be just below that of someone seconds after winning a medium-expensive raffle prize — but it quickly congeals into theatrical horror when I reveal that I know that she is a casual but talented singer of jazz music.
When she was 10, Clarke was an alto in a chorus that she describes as “very churchy.” Then a substitute teacher introduced her class to jazz. “I just innately understood it,” she explains. “I was always sliding up and down the notes. Every time, the [chorus] teacher would be like, ‘Quit sliding, just sing that note and then that one and that’s it. Stop trying to fuck with it.’ Then this [jazz teacher] was like, ‘Fuck with it. That’s the point.’ ” Fast-forward a couple of decades, and Clarke was singing “The Way You Look Tonight” at the American Songbook Gala in New York, honoring Richard Plepler, erstwhile CEO of HBO. Nicole Kidman was there, too, and that is the story of Emilia Clarke, a very famous singer.
Just kidding, again! That is the story of Emilia Clarke, extremely famous actress, and it is not even the beginning. Game of Thrones, the HBO fantasy epic that has captured the global zeitgeist for most of the past decade, has entered its ultimate season. Since the show premiered in 2011, Daenerys’s searing platinum blonde has been branded into the brains of every living person with cable access, so much so that she has become as recognizable an action figure as Princess Leia. Every autumn, legions of Americans don Grecian-style dresses and carry stuffed dragons to Halloween parties in homage. Kristen Wiig even appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in a full Daenerys getup. This phenomenon exists in part because it’s a relatively easy costume to assemble, but more likely because Game of Thrones is the most popular TV show in the history of TV shows.
It’s also just one of three popular entertainment franchises Clarke has participated in. Last year: Solo: A Star Wars Story, as a paramour of Han Solo. Two years before that: the fifth Terminator movie, beside Arnold. She was also Holly Golightly in a short-lived Breakfast at Tiffany’s production on Broadway. None of those projects were particularly successful — but none of that matters, to a remarkable degree, because what matters is: The people love Daenerys.
They love a character whose series arc begins with her indentured servitude as a warlord’s concubine and ends, most recently, with her fighting for sovereignty over a league of nations and for a throne made of swords. They love how fictional languages drift from her mouth like dancing smoke, and how her searing-white mane retains a fearsome curl, even in or near battle. They love the whole dragons thing.
The people would love Emilia Clarke, too, if only they knew who she was. During the first few seasons of Game of Thrones, Clarke was able to fool the general public into believing she was very regular civilian Emilia Clarke, because Daenerys was blonde, and Clarke was not. Now, she says, recognition happens more frequently. Particularly Stateside.
For reasons I cannot fathom, Americans feel more entitled to command the attention of celebrities. “People are like, ‘UH-melia CLORK!’ ” she says, in perfect American. In London, people are prone to whisper about her as she passes by. “ ‘Was that Emilia Clarke?’ ”
“I move like a shark when I’m in public,” she says. “Head down. I think I’ve got quite bad posture because of it, because I’m determined to lead a normal life. So I just move too quickly for anyone to register if it’s me or not. And I don’t walk around with six security men and big sunglasses and a bizarre coat. I really try to meld in.” It gets worse when the show is being promoted, but otherwise, she says, it’s not so bad.
“I move like a shark when I’m in public. Head down…I’m determined to lead a normal life, so I just move too quickly for anyone to register if it’s me or not.”
Her best efforts aside, anonymity may be a pipe dream. The show is as decorated as a Christmas tree in a craft store. Game of Thrones has won a Peabody and 47 Emmys, the most of any television drama in history. The show marries critical praise with popular success, then it mercilessly slaughters those who have come to celebrate this union and receives even more acclaim (“The Rains of Castamere,” season 3, episode 9). The plotlines are famously convoluted. Luckily, we have an entire web’s worth of episode explainers, encyclopedias designed specifically for the Westeros universe, and a self-explanatory Funny or Die segment called Gay of Thrones, starring Jonathan van Ness.
When Mad Men first aired, television bloggers dutifully unpacked its symbolic elements, and millennials celebrated the show’s style with Mad Men–themed parties that were really just ’60s-and-one-red-wig-themed parties. Game of Thrones is basically an economy of its own. Since the show premiered, tourism to Croatia, whose coastal port Dubrovnik stands in for the fictional city of King’s Landing, has nearly doubled. Game of Thrones–themed weddings are so popular that it is almost impossible not to attend them — in 2016, Clarke accidentally walked into one that was occurring at the same hotel where she and the cast were staying during filming. (It was not a canonical wedding, and no guests were harmed.)
Game of Thrones has also earned one of the most important pop culture accolades of the century: The attention of Beyoncé Knowles. I believe it is her favorite TV show, and this is why.
Exhibit A: Jay-Z reportedly gave her a prop dragon’s egg from the set, at great personal expense. Exhibit B: At an Oscars after-party this year, Beyoncé approached Clarke (“voluntarily,” according to the actress) to introduce herself. “I watched her face go, ‘Oh, no, I shouldn’t be talking to this crazy [woman], who is essentially crying in front of me,’ ” remembers Clarke. “I think my inner monologue was, ‘Stop fucking it up,’ and I kept fucking it up.”
“I was like, ‘I just saw you in concert.’ And she was like, ‘I know.’ ” Clarke also mentions that Beyoncé complimented her work but declines to share specifics.
Why are people (more specifically, everybody) and goddesses (more specifically, Beyoncé) all obsessed with a show about some dragons and lots of dungeons?
“The show is sensationalist in a way,” Clarke explains, in an effort to describe a TV series that features twins having sex and a child’s defenestration in the very first episode. It doesn’t matter — Clarke’s conversational style is so intimate and emphatic that basic facts feel like sworn secrets. When she smiles, she does so with every single muscle in her face. “It’s the reason why people pick up gossip magazines. They want to know what happens next…. You’ve got a society that is far removed enough from ours but also circulates around power. How that corrupts people and how we want it, and how we don’t want it.”
In other words, Game of Thrones’ value proposition is creating a rich other world for people to experience a prestige, high-production version of pure, horny, violent, unbridled drama. It is, according to Clarke, pitched perfectly: “I think it caught Western society at exactly the right moment.”
“I don’t know about you,” she says, “but when I watch something, it’s escapism. I’m feeling crappy; I’m just sad, moody, depressed, upset, angry, whatever it is. I know that distraction is what makes me get better. Distraction is what really, really helps me.” She laughs and then quickly pivots to a caveat: “I’m sure that’s not what a therapist would advise.”
It is at this point that Emilia Clarke leans in very close, her breath knocking at my sideburn, and explains to me the bombastic and devastating ending to the most important TV show of the decade.
Wow — just kidding once more. But, uh, while we’re on the topic, how is this whole thing going to end?
It was not hard to root for the Breaker of Chains, until recently. Now we’re seeing the gentle unspooling of her character, and flickers of a dangerous prophecy that she will ascend the throne only to follow in her father’s footsteps and burn it all to the ground. For a while, Daenerys seemed like the Lawful Good ruler, but we have had the great pleasure of watching how power can pervert people. (Nate Jones, at Vulture, leads a thrilling discussion of this very topic.) (Also, if Daenerys were to rule the Seven Kingdoms, only to go nuts, we might at the very least have a spinoff to look forward to.)
Clarke will never say. Throughout 10 or so years in the public eye, her interviews have been peppered with the same handful of charming personal details from her career — the service jobs she worked prior to making it, dancing the funky chicken during her Game of Thrones audition — which feels a lot like walking a vast beach and finding the same series of 10 seashells.
Then, in March, some very different treasure washed ashore when The New Yorker ran the most illuminating profile of Emilia Clarke to date. It was written by Emilia Clarke.
If I am truly being honest every minute of every day I thought I was going to die.
In it, Clarke revealed that she had suffered two near-fatal brain aneurysms during the early seasons of Game of Thrones. The first hit her mid-plank during a training session, and not long after, doctors discovered a second that required them to open her skull for a risky operation. The recovery period was, to her, more painful than the aneurysms. “If I am truly being honest,” she wrote, “every minute of every day I thought I was going to die.” She also announced her charity venture, SameYou, which seeks to provide rehabilitation for young people recovering from brain injuries.
The second time we talk, it is the day before the Game of Thrones New York premiere, and Clarke is at a morning fitting, surrounded by a coronation’s worth of gowns. It’s early, and a passing cold has fried the edges of her voice. But her words still vibrate with so much joy, it’s like she doesn’t even notice. She’s just happy to be here, wherever she is.
