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Having portrayed the Mother of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen on HBO’s Game of Thrones for nearly a decade, Emilia Clarke now has one of the most enviable careers in the entertainment industry. She’s a global star with a growing list of acting credits under her belt. Even though nothing she does will ever be quite like GoT, there’s still years of incredible success ahead of her.
Though she is the most well-known for portraying Daenerys, Clarke’s career has also featured other ups and downs that have mostly gone unnoticed by the press. Check out 10 surprising details about Emilia Clarke’s career below!
She Once Worked In A Call Center
Somehow, we can’t imagine Emilia Clarke working in a call center. But before she made it as an actress, that’s exactly what she did. Although she won the role of Daenerys Targaryen at the fairly young age of 22, she still had a few years between doing the show and leaving school where acting wasn’t paying her bills.
“I made the rent working in a pub, in a call center, and at an obscure museum, telling people that “the loos are just to the right,’” she penned in an essay for The New Yorker. “Seconds lasted days.”
She Impressed The GoT Producers With A Dance
So just how was Clarke able to win one of the most coveted roles in the UK, especially when she wasn’t an established actress and had only minimal experience acting professionally? The actress revealed that she impressed the producers with her own interpretation of the funky chicken and the robot dance during her audition.
While Daenerys isn’t required to dance at all during the show, this probably showed the producers that Clarke would be fantastic to work with due to her bright and sunny energetic attitude. She won the role straight after the interview.
There Was Nearly Another Actress Who Played Daenerys
As Game of Thrones fans, this news is pretty scary. We can’t imagine it now that we know how perfect Clarke is for the role, but there really could have been someone else playing Daenerys! Clarke’s agent actually told her about the audition after they’d already done some filming with another actress playing the role of Dany: Tamzin Merchant.
They held auditions to replace Merchant for reasons that have never been revealed. The actress is best known for portraying Georgiana Darcy in the 2005 Jane Austin adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
She Was Able To Stay Anonymous, Even After She Was A Star
Like her castmates, Emilia Clarke became a huge star after just one season of starring on Game of Thrones. But according to Bustle, she was actually able to stay anonymous while in public, even if fans recognized her character Daenerys. How did Clarke manage this? It was all thanks to that iconic blonde wig.
“Everyone else off the show had people coming up to them all the time and I was always the girl they asked to take the photo,” she explained. “Each time it happened, I thanked my lucky stars for that wig!” However, now that fans have caught on that Clarke doesn’t really have long blonde hair, she’s much easier to spot.
She Appeared On Broadway But Didn’t Find Success
In her personal essay for The New Yorker, Clarke opened up about her recent health struggles in addition to the ups and downs of her career so far. She revealed that she briefly starred as Holly Golightly on Broadway in 2013, but the show was not successful.
Interestingly, 2013 was two years after GoT first aired, so Clarke was already an established star at this time. It just goes to show how volatile the industry can be and how even the most accomplished stars never have guaranteed success with any project they take on.
She Learns Lessons From Her Characters
Clarke applies the lessons that she’s learned in life into her characters, but she also applies the lessons her characters teach her into her life. In an interview with Stellar, via Bustle, the actress admitted that she learned a lot from playing the super-powerful Daenerys Targaryen for eight seasons.
“She taught me about lady balls,” she said. “She taught me what it feels like to be in a room and be heard. She wielded such power, calmness and such poise.” Though Clarke’s not going to be burning down a city any time soon, she’ll definitely take the values she learned from Dany with her on her journey.
Her Characters Give Her Strength In Real Life
Not only does Clarke learn important lessons from her characters, but some of them give her strength in real life. When she needs to display power or courage as an actress, she sometimes calls upon the traits that “fierce intensity” that Daenerys embodied.
“… as a 25-year-old standing in front of 500 extras, 150 crew members, six cameras, a drone, dragons and fire, I had to bring it,” she explained.“I felt like if I can do that, then the red carpet doesn’t feel so scary to me at all.”
She Dreamed Of Starring In An Iconic Movie Like Terminator
In the middle of her time on Game of Thrones, Clarke also had the opportunity to star in Terminator Genisys, which was released in 2015. In the film, Clarke starred as Sarah Connor, who is destined to be the mother of John Connor. She appears alongside some huge names in the movie business, including Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was a dream come true for Clarke, who fantasized about starring in a movie just like Terminator Genisys as a child.
She revealed that the movie is “the kind of iconic story that everyone grows up watching and, ever since I was a little girl, I had dreamed of making films like this.”
In The Beginning, She Had Trouble Remembering Her Lines
Now, there’s no question that Clarke was put on this planet to act. But when she was still in school, her destiny wasn’t that clear, mainly because she had such trouble remembering her lines. In her personal essay with The New Yorker, she explained that she got her first lead part in a play when she was just five years old, but when she got on the stage, she could only stand there in silence.
She admitted that she wasn’t scared to be standing on stage without remembering her lines. Instead, she took it all in and felt a strange sense of calm as she enjoyed gazing at the audience.
She Doesn’t Believe That She’ll Ever Do Anything Quite Like GoT Again
GoT is one of those shows that comes along once in a lifetime. So it comes as no surprise that Clarke isn’t confident that she’ll ever be able to be part of a project that is on that scale again. “I don’t feel pressure to follow up the show because it’s unfollowable,” she said.
Since finishing GoT, Clarke appeared in the 2019 Christmas flick Last Christmas, where she plays a character that couldn’t be further from Daenerys Targaryen (except for the blonde hair!). The film has been a success, even if it doesn’t resemble GoT.
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