Emilia Clarke has opened up about her experience with two brain injuries while working on Game of Thrones.
The actress, who portrayed Daenerys Targaryen, suffered a brain hemorrhage in February 2011, around the time the HBO fantasy drama’s first season premiered. She experienced another brain bleed in 2013.
“When you have a brain injury, it dramatically alters your sense of self, making all of your insecurities at work quadruple overnight,” Clarke, 37, shared in an interview with The Big Issue published on Monday, June 10.
“Our first fear was: ‘Oh my God, am I going to get fired? Will they think I’m not capable of completing the job?’”
The Big Issue reported that both hemorrhages occurred between seasons, so Clarke only informed a few colleagues about her condition.
However, after returning to the set just weeks after her first brain bleed, she worried that the stress and pressure of working on such a large production might cause another hemorrhage.
“Well, if I’m going to die, I better die on live TV,” Clarke recalled thinking at the time.
Clarke first publicly discussed her brain injuries in an essay in March 2019, just before the final season of Game of Thrones premiered.
“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,” she wrote about her first aneurysm in February 2011.
“As I later learned, about a third of SAH patients die immediately or soon thereafter. For those who survive, urgent treatment is required to seal off the aneurysm, as there is a high risk of a second, often fatal bleed.
If I wanted to live and avoid severe deficits, I needed urgent surgery. And, even then, there were no guarantees.”
After the surgery, Clarke suffered from aphasia and couldn’t remember her own name.
Her second injury occurred in 2013 after filming Game of Thrones Season 3. She was in New York and underwent a procedure to treat a growth that had increased in size on the other side of her brain.
Clarke was “promised a relatively simple operation, easier than last time,” but woke up from the surgery “screaming in pain.”
“The procedure had failed. I had a massive bleed, and the doctors made it clear that my chances of survival were precarious without another operation.
This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way — through my skull,” she wrote, noting that the recovery from her second injury was “even more painful” than the first one.
As a result of the surgery, Clarke now has pieces of titanium in her skull and a scar that “curves from my scalp to my ear.”
