Topics: Emilia Clarke, Game of Thrones, Health, Podcast, Mental Health
Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke has opened up about ‘feeling ashamed’ after suffering brain aneurysms.
Clarke, who played Daenerys Targaryen on the hit show, suffered two life threatening aneurysms. The first happened in 2011, after wrapping the first season of the show, and the second in 2013, after filming season three.
According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes, a brain aneurysm is ‘a weak spot on an artery in the brain that balloons and fills with blood,’ which can but pressure on the brain tissue and nerves. These can also rupture and cause a hemorrhage.
Clarke has been open about her health experiences, and is now candidly opening up on Elizabeth Day’s How To Fail podcast, about how she feels like she ‘cheated death’.
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The 39-year-old revealed that a month after her first aneurysm surgery in 2011, she was out doing press for the first season of the HBO show.
“I was so ashamed that this thing had happened,” she candidly revealed. “And that the people who employed me might see me as weak, or see me as something that could be broken.
Clarke, who was 24-years-old during the first season of GOT added: “I was so young and it was so all-consuming that any repercussions of the injury I just absolutely ignored.”
She told Day that she ‘tried to pretend it didn’t happen in order to keep working,’ revealing that she only told two show runners about what she had been through - who were 'so kind and lovely'.
Elsewhere in the interview, Clarke said she felt like she ‘cheated death’ especially after her second aneurysm in 2013.
Clarke then emotionally opened up, telling Day that she ‘felt the opposite of great’ after recovering. Instead, all she could think about was the fact she ‘should be dead’.
“‘I’m not to be here, this is going to come and get me,’” she thought.
Later, Clarke admitted that she ‘didn’t know what she would have done’ without her work.
Six weeks after an operation, Clarke recalled suffering a headache during a live MTV interview at San Diago’s Comic-Con, and due to previous experiences, thought she was going to die.
“In my head I thought, ‘I’ll do it on live TV,’” she said.
The actor previously revealed she had missing ‘quite a bit’ of her brain after her health problems.
In 2022, she told BBC’s Sunday Morning that it was ‘remarkable’ she could still speak, and live her life normally with no repercussions.
