Emilia Clarke has spent the past several years as one of the most famous actresses in the world for playing Daenerys Targaryen the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Lady of Dragonstone, Breaker of Chains, and the Mother of Dragons. Yet, in an article, The New Yorker we got to see the vulnerable side of Emilia Clarke as the young actress spoke about her medical history and the two brain aneurysms that took place soon after she joined the show.
In the piece, Clarke talks about having won the role of Daenerys on Game of Thrones despite doing the robot during her audition and dealing with all the stress and newfound fame that came from the first season. “I was terrified. Terrified of the attention, terrified of a business I barely understood, terrified of trying to make good on the faith that the creators of Thrones had put in me,” she says in the piece. “I felt, in every way, exposed.”
During a training session, Clarke found herself struggling through some routines, and once she got put in a plank position, she described feeling as if something were squeezing her brain. “I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill. Meanwhile, the pain—shooting, stabbing, constricting pain—was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged.”
She was rushed in an ambulance and given an MRI to found out what exactly had happened:
“The diagnosis was quick and ominous: a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a life-threatening type of stroke, caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain. I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture. As I later learned, about a third of SAH patients die immediately or soon thereafter. For the patients who do survive, urgent treatment is required to seal off the aneurysm, as there is a very high risk of a second, often fatal bleed. If I was to live and avoid terrible deficits, I would have to have urgent surgery. And, even then, there were no guarantees.”
For anyone, something like that would be terrifying, but at age twenty-four, after just getting your big break in being a major lead on a hit HBO show, it must have felt like having the floor yanked from under you just as the glass slipper went on.
According to academic research, spontaneous SAH occurs in about one per 10,000 people per year, and women are more regularly affected than men. It usually comes after some sort of head trauma, but in Clarke’s case, it seems to have truly happened without any catalyst.
After the surgery, Clarke had a terrifying experience of not being able to remember her name and losing the ability to speak clear words. “I’d never experienced fear like that—a sense of doom closing in. I could see my life ahead, and it wasn’t worth living. I am an actor; I need to remember my lines. Now I couldn’t recall my name.” This loss of ability was caused by “aphasia” which was caused by the trauma done to her brain.
“Even as I was muttering nonsense, my mum did me the great kindness of ignoring it and trying to convince me that I was perfectly lucid. But I knew I was faltering. In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug. I asked the medical staff to let me die. My job—my entire dream of what my life would be—centered on language, on communication. Without that, I was lost.”
The aphasia passed, and eventually, Clarke was able to get full control again, but she also had to return to set and do a bunch of interviews during this time where she was going to have to swallow her pain and smile: “I vividly remember thinking, I can’t keep up or think or breathe, much less try to be charming. I sipped on morphine in between interviews. The pain was there, and the fatigue was like the worst exhaustion I’d ever experienced, multiplied by a million.”
Still, much like her show counterpart, she persisted. In 2013, after season three of Thrones and Breakfast at Tiffany’s Clarke went in for her routine brain scan and found out that the growth on the other side of her brain had doubled in size, and the doctor recommended that they “take care of it,” what should have been a normal procedure.
“The procedure had failed. I had a massive bleed and the doctors made it plain that my chances of surviving were precarious if they didn’t operate again. This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way—through my skull. And the operation had to happen immediately. […] Bits of my skull had been replaced by titanium.
I lost all hope. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye. There was terrible anxiety, panic attacks.”
I highly recommend reading the whole piece; Clarke is honest about her pain, her terror, and the deep sorrow she felt throughout these experiences. As we know, not only did she make it, but went through all of this in silence without fans knowing and still showing up when it was expected of her. It’s heartbreaking that she may have felt like she had to keep this all a secret not to burden anyone, but the people most important to her (like her family) were by her side.
I’m also super happy that she is also giving back and is developing a charity in conjunction with partners in the U.K. and the U.S., called SameYou, that “aims to provide treatment for people recovering from brain injuries and stroke.”
Breaker of chains indeed.
(via New Yorker, image: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Turner)
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