Emilia Clarke opens up about the one thing she feared over death after suffering a life-threatening condition in 2011.
Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar UK, the Game of Thrones star, 37, revealed she was scared of being fired from the show after having a brain haemorrhage.
“I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was afraid of being fired,” Clarke told the magazine.
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“I decided: This is not something that’s going to define me,” she continued.
“I never gave into any feeling of ‘Why me? This sucks’. I was just like – gotta get back on it.”
The Game of Thrones actress had her first subarachnoid haemorrhage in 2011 and had to undergo surgery for the potentially life-threatening scare.
At the time, she had just finished filming the first season of the hit show where she plays fan-favourite Daenerys Targaryen.
But just as the show continued to have worldwide success, Clarke suffered a second hemorrhage two years later in 2013.
“If I’m being brutally honest, the whole thing made me feel very ashamed,” she admitted to the magazine.
“Like, I was broken. As though the producers must think I’m an unreliable person that they’ve hired.”
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Clarke claimed that after suffering her haemorrhage she’s become “much more aware of what’s happening.”
“If I hadn’t had a brain haemorrhage, I might have turned into a right old d—head, thinking I was the bee’s knees, living in Hollywood,” she admitted.
The actress has previously spoken about her fears of being axed from the HBO series because of her health issues.
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“I just was, and consistently, so scared of being fired for whatever reason. That was just me, more than them,” she said on the Jessie Ware’s Table Manners podcast in 2019.
”I had no idea how taken care of I was,” she admitted.
Clarke first publicly revealed her health scares in a 2019 essay published in the New Yorker
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The star recalled being rushed to hospital after noticing a “shooting, stabbing, constricting pain” in her head which turned out to be an aneurysm.
She then developed a condition called aphasia where she “couldn’t recall” her own name.
“Nonsense words tumbled out of my mouth and I went into a blind panic. I’d never experienced fear like that — a sense of doom closing in,” she wrote.
In 2019, Clarke founded the brain injury recovery charity SameYou to raise awareness and funds for brain injury and stroke.