Emilia Clarke turns Emmy heartbreak into a new definition

After winning fame as Daenerys Targaryen, Emilia Clarke says a string of setbacks—from the bitter “Game of Thrones” finale to losing the 2019 Emmy—pushed her to rethink what success means, especially after surviving brain hemorrhages and launching her recovery

The morning after the 2019 Emmy Awards, Emilia Clarke woke up with a goal: to redefine what she saw as success.

She wasn’t starting from scratch. Even after her work across big-budget “Terminator” and “Star Wars” spinoffs. Clarke still carried the unmistakable weight of premium TV stardom. For years. she was the de facto queen of drama. thanks to her portrayal of Daenerys Targaryen in HBO’s fantasy hit “Game of Thrones”—a role that made her a byword for female empowerment. and a costume-party staple long before people started treating it like culture history.

But success has sharp edges. The movies that came after—2015’s “Terminator Genisys” and 2018’s “Solo: A Star Wars Movie”—underperformed. And then “Game of Thrones” ended in May 2019 in a way that left a deep bruise on the fanbase. Daenerys’ downfall played out with the long-coveted Iron Throne finally within reach. only for her to be fatally betrayed by her lover-slash-nephew Jon Snow (Kit Harington) as she went mad with power. Clarke admits she was “absolutely livid” about the manner of her demise.

Four months later, she walked into the Emmys with the hope that winning would close that chapter on a brighter note. Yet on the night, Jodie Comer took home the award for “Killing Eve,” crushing Clarke.

“I’m embarrassed to admit that not winning an Emmy was a really significant thing. ” Clarke says when she meets MISRYOUM at the Hotel Café Royal in London one April afternoon. She remembers looking toward the Microsoft Theater in downtown Los Angeles and thinking. “Everyone’s over ‘Game of Thrones’ now — you’re old news.” Tired and sad. she skipped the after-parties and went home.

The next morning. she vowed never to “behave that way again.” “I do not like that person. ” she says she thought. reproaching herself. The change, she decided, would be bigger than a single loss. “The solution,” Clarke says, was to redefine success. “Because clearly,” she adds with a self-deprecating laugh, “I have a 13-year-old’s idea of success.”.

That idea has a habit of colliding with reality—especially when you’re forced to look at your own body and your own life as something that can change without warning.

Clarke says she nearly didn’t get the training that led her to “Game of Thrones.” After spending two years applying without success to institutions such as the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. she was only offered a place at Drama Centre London after another student dropped out at the last minute. Her path into the series was just as unpredictable. Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had shot a pilot with Tamzin Merchant as Daenerys. but after “disastrous notes from HBO. ” most of it was scrapped and multiple roles were recast. Clarke was working at the London Film Museum when her agent called. She ran to the bathroom to answer.

“I was like” — she affects a stage whisper — “‘Hello?’ And he said, ‘You ever audition for “Game of Thrones?”’ I was like, ‘You’ve just said gobbledygook. I have no idea what we’re talking about.’”

After multiple rounds of auditions in London and Los Angeles, Daenerys was hers.

At first. Clarke said she was ecstatic—“I genuinely had three weeks of parties.” But during a preproduction vacation with her parents. she read her scenes for the first time and “just cried with fear.” Daenerys’ early screen time involves disrobing before being fondled by her on-screen brother as he discloses his plan to marry her off to a nomadic tribe of warriors. “Can you imagine the terror?” Clarke asks.

She also made it clear that she didn’t experience “bad stuff” on the show. “I just don’t want to specifically say” she later explains. but in that moment she framed it as different from what people sometimes fear. She said it felt more like general insensitivity to how a 23-year-old might feel standing nude in a room full of strangers. “Because I know what it can be,” she says. “And on ‘Game of Thrones’ I never had that.”.

When asked whether she experienced it elsewhere. she replied that she’d seen “lack of care on other jobs” that “could have been prevented with some consideration.” She was pressed on whether she meant “Terminator Genisys” or “Solo: A Star Wars Story. ” and this is where she politely stepped away from the specifics.

“I don’t want to specifically say,” Clarke says. “There’s just been a number of occasions where I’ve been like, ‘This ain’t right.’ And again, it’s not through someone abusing power; it’s through lack of thinking and care.”

There was a counterpoint coming too. Clarke described the sex scene in her upcoming Prime Video series “Criminal” as a “dream.” She said she walked onto that set, saw how director Dee Rees was behaving, then went to the loo and wept for her younger self—“who did not get that.”

What “Game of Thrones” did give her was a kind of momentum that changed the scale of her life. Clarke said financial security let her pay off her parents’ mortgage. She also pushed back on the reported salary often attached to the show’s main cast. saying the figure of $300. 000 per episode was “wildly exaggerated.” “We didn’t earn that much. ” she says. “Can you imagine?. I’d have been driving a couple of Porsches!”.

Fame, she said, was another kind of disorienting. “I spent a lot of time trying to understand it,” Clarke says. “And then you realize it’s just a formula: The less you’re on TV, the less famous you are. It comes and it goes.”

Behind that calm explanation, though, were seismic shifts happening in her head.

Not long after wrapping on the first season of “Game of Thrones,” Clarke collapsed at the gym. She’d had a brain hemorrhage that required immediate hospitalization and emergency surgery. She suffered another hemorrhage after Season 3.

Clarke says she didn’t go public with her condition until 2019. when she launched SameYou. a brain injury charity that helps with all aspects of recovery. She said survivor’s guilt is a real and common part of brain injury. “For a number of years. I felt that I had cheated death. and it was coming to get me. ” she says. “I truly felt like I had done something wrong, and I shouldn’t be here.”.

She added: “I also thought it ruined my ability to act — which some people might agree with!” Clarke cackles.

Then her private grief deepened. Clarke said there was further heartbreak when her father died from cancer after Season 7—at the same time the frenzy around “Game of Thrones” was growing and she was scared to leave the house. After that came the controversial series finale, the Emmys, and the pandemic that shut down the industry. “The most extreme versions of life happened in that 10-year period,” she reflects.

Those years didn’t just reshape how she handles roles; they reshaped how she chooses them. Outside “Game of Thrones,” she took on other franchises, including the Marvel series “Secret Invasion” in 2022. She doesn’t sugarcoat the public reception. About “Secret Invasion,” she says in a goofy voice, “I don’t think no one liked that show, guys. I’m sorry!” She then added: “‘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?”.

When asked if frosty receptions disappointed her, Clarke said she entered “already existing franchises,” so when projects “don’t work out,” it isn’t personal.

That brings her back to redefining success in concrete steps: she said she started by saying “no” more often. “I said no to a lot,” she recalls. “I need to wait for the right thing.”

Then she changed her expectations. The perfect job, she said, might not exist—just like the perfect house or the perfect man. So she took the next step. choosing roles “for no other reason than that I would enjoy that job.” She describes how her connection ends when they say “Picture wrap. ” because “it’s not for me to decide what people will think of it.”.

That philosophy feeds into “Next Life. ” a “Sliding Doors”-like romantic drama made on a shoestring budget. where she plays two versions of an aspiring jazz singer named Ivy. The film premieres at the Tribeca Festival next month. Clarke says it’s one of the first times since deciding how she defines success that she realized how “profoundly true that was.” After it wrapped. she said she let go of any anxiety about reception. “I need nothing from it,” she explains. “It’s given me everything I ever needed, including a real friendship circle.”.

She and director Drake Doremus even got matching ivy tattoos, and she shows them by rolling up the left sleeve of her sweater.

After “Next Life. ” there’s “Criminal. ” in which she plays Mallory. described by Clarke as “all tits and gold chains.” There’s also Bea. her character in the recently released Peacock series “Ponies”—the straight-edge wife of a CIA agent who investigates her husband’s mysterious death in Soviet-era Russia.

“It was such a joy to read,” Clarke says of “Ponies.” She contrasts it with scripts where she’ll think, “Can’t wait to watch it; don’t want to be in it.” “That was not this,” she says.

Clarke takes on the lead role opposite Haley Lu Richardson and also boarded as a producer. She said Season 1 ended on a cliffhanger. and the “Ponies” team is hoping to get a greenlight for a second season order any day now. “There have been ‘many discussions’ about where the show might go next,” Clarke says. “I’m very fortunate to be an actual producer, so I get to be a part of these conversations.”.

She doesn’t hide the contrast with “Game of Thrones.” She said she didn’t have creative input on that show, “nor did I want any.” Clarke still praises Benioff and Weiss, calling them “geniuses” while dismissing her younger self as “not qualified.”

When asked whether she could have persuaded them to change Daenerys’ fate. she reacts immediately: “No.” She said Benioff and Weiss were “fastidious about us saying the lines exactly as they’ve written them” and described what that meant on set. “If she said ‘it’s’ instead of ‘it is. ’ they’d ask her to go again.” Clarke says that while she brought Daenerys to life over eight years. she never felt like she had a hand in developing the character. “I was given the seasons. and I. to the best of my ability. empathized and understood and tracked every choice she made so it felt like mine. ” she says. “I felt like that was what my job was.”.

Success, in her telling, isn’t a verdict anymore. It’s a place she can finally stand without being pulled back.

“I have gone through every circuitous route to get to the place that I am now,” Clarke says. “Which is finally being able to be very grateful for everything that ‘Game of Thrones’ did and has given me.” She says she no longer feels “trapped in it, or trapped in the result of being in it.”

“I feel just really lucky that it happened to me,” she says. “Even luckier that I’ve had time to understand what that was, and now I feel firmly on the other side.”

Outside the spotlight, she ties that “other side” to her work with SameYou.

Clarke said she experienced not one but two brain hemorrhages while playing the Mother of Dragons in “Game of Thrones.” She described what came after as being lost in a sea of “What next?” when it came to recovery and aftercare of a brain injury. She said she kept her condition private for as long as she could. then told her story in 2019—just before “Game of Thrones” broadcast its eighth and final season—when she launched SameYou. a charity dedicated to brain injury recovery.

She described brain injury in existential terms: “Brain injury is very specific, because if I were to ask you where you think you reside in your body, you would probably say your brain.” She said that makes it terrifying “on such an existential level,” and that it happens to “one in three of us.”

SameYou. she said. partners with academics and doctors to find new ways to assist recovery. including “ground-breaking therapies and new trials.” Clarke said she knows the feeling of leaving hospital and not knowing where to turn. With SameYou’s support, she said she hopes other survivors “won’t feel so alone.”.

Emilia Clarke Game of Thrones Daenerys Targaryen Emmy Awards 2019 SameYou brain injury charity survivor’s guilt Next Life Criminal Ponies