‘There are other women who remove items of clothing on Game Of Thrones’: Emilia Clarke on nudity, blonde wigs and dragons
She spent most of the first series wearing nothing but a blonde wig. But now she’s a queen with three dragons and a eunuch army to cover her back. So, Emilia Clarke asks Event, who’ll dare take me on?
‘Daenerys is a really good vehicle for reaching out to the women as well... You’re seeing a more archaic view of the male/female divide than you do now,' said Emilia Clarke (pictured with Jorah Mormont played by Iain Glen)
Between takes on the Game Of Thrones set outside Belfast in Northern Ireland, actress Emilia Clarke is revealing the secrets of the hit fantasy show.
Yes, of course, the dragons that are the ‘babies’ of her character are not real. But neither, it turns out, is her hair.
‘This is all wig,’ she says with a grin, touching the silver-blonde mane that flows with queen-like elegance from her head.
‘There’s nothing real here. It takes two-and-a-half hours every day.’
The painstaking process of transforming the dark-haired 28-year-old Londoner into Daenerys Targaryen – aka Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea – is tackled with the kind of attention to detail that is typical of the HBO drama.
‘They braid my hair so it’s like cornrows, then they tie and pin that, then glue a bald cap, then paint the bald cap, then they glue the wig on and pin it and cut it to size, then dress it.’
Clarke is one of the breakout stars of Game Of Thrones.
Hollywood sources suggest that, alongside other core members of the cast, she’ll be earning over $7 million per series by the time production begins on the seventh season next autumn.
She was nominated for a 2013 Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, played Jude Law’s daughter in Dom Hemingway (2013) and starred as Holly Golightly on Broadway in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
‘They braid my hair so it’s like cornrows, then they tie and pin that, then glue a bald cap, then paint the bald cap, then they glue the wig on and pin it and cut it to size, then dress it,’ said Emilia
This summer she graduates to blockbusters as the female lead in Terminator Genisys alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger.
As a mark of just how big a deal she now is on the back of Game Of Thrones, she was also offered the saucy female lead in Fifty Shades Of Grey – a part she declined with ‘no regrets’, saying that she had ‘done nudity before and was concerned with being labelled for doing it again’.
In the show’s first series Clarke was notoriously filmed naked in many of her key scenes although by series four she had resorted to wearing clothes – perhaps more befitting her regal position.
Game Of Thrones has never stinted on sex scenes, as Clarke acknowledges: ‘We’ve been able to take it to a very real level. It was never pretending to be a show for kids! It’s gritty in a good, realistic way.’
And, as she jokes, ‘There are other women who remove items of clothing on Game Of Thrones, so they’ve got my nipple count down now.’
That said, she admits that when she started filming the show in 2010 some of the scenes were shocking, including an initiation ritual in which she ate a horse’s heart.
‘It tasted like congealed jam, with a hint of bleach. I did the occasional double-take during season one when I saw the script but now, less so.
'I didn’t watch the first couple of episodes with my parents but now they love it.’
But for all that fame and acclaim, her heavy Game Of Thrones disguise means she can go about her daily business without the fan hassle that dogs her co-star Kit Harington.
As for the three dragons, they’ve grown in size in tandem with the exploding popularity of the show.
In season two, the scaly creatures were cute and pet-sized, burping the occasional puff of smoke.
They were a good fit, in a way, for the dainty, 5ft 2in actress. To film the scenes, the show’s ‘Mother of Dragons’ recalls how the special-effects team would give her full-size replica models.
'Drogon would sit on my shoulder, Rhaegal in my arms, Viserion would be around somewhere.
'They’d attach them, so we could do a camera rehearsal and I would know the size, then they’d take them away and there’s genuinely nothing there apart from marker dots.’
The show’s been nerve jangling for the young Englishwoman, who only graduated from Drama Centre London the year before she was cast. She quickly had to come to terms with a show that is as brutal off-screen as it is on.
The American producers have no hesitation in killing off characters, no matter how big the star.
The best-known face in season one, Sean Bean, was beheaded in the final episode of the first series. Clarke admits she and the rest of the cast instantly started worrying who was next.
‘As an actor it keeps you on your toes, genuinely not knowing who’s gonna go next. It’s about keeping the audience guessing, which is the joy of it. But I’ve got faith in Dany – she’s not going anywhere.’
Born in London, where she currently lives, the well-spoken Clarke grew up in rural Berkshire with her parents and younger brother.
She attended public school in Oxford and the stage was, in a way, in her blood – her father is a sound designer for theatre.
It was on the set of Terminator that Clarke met her latest boyfriend, Australian actor Jai Courtney, but she refuses to discuss the relationship, or her previous six-month romance with the writer/director of Ted and Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane.
Clarke says when her agents first offered her the script, it wasn’t a tough sell, as it was quickly clear that Game Of Thrones was a very different kind of fantasy – not just a show for geeky boys.
‘Daenerys is a really good vehicle for reaching out to the women as well... You’re looking at a world that is incredibly male-orientated. And you’re seeing a more archaic view of the male/female divide than you do now.
'It takes ten times the guts to be a woman there than in modern-day society because you’re up against so much more.
'With Game Of Thrones, the women are more interesting than the guy characters. I would say that, though!’
So, season five is almost upon us. Come the fateful battle between the warring ‘houses’, will Daenerys triumph? Will she, finally, take her seat on the Iron Throne?
‘I’m rooting for Dany the whole way!’ Clarke laughs.
‘I mean, she has dragons! How is somebody going to come up against that? Seriously? They can’t.’
Daenerys Targaryen
Mother of Dragons, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea
When we first meet Daenerys she has been promised in marriage to the Dothraki leader Khal Drogo by her brother Viserys.
Despite a brutal start to their marriage they eventually fall in love, until Daenerys is forced into a mercy killing of her husband after he falls under a potent spell.
Daenerys enters Drogo’s funeral pyre but walks out unscathed bearing three baby dragons which enable her to gather a huge army made up of eunuch slave soldiers, but her dragons are proving far harder to control...
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