The actress who plays Daenerys Targaryen, who suffered two aneurysms after filming the first season of the series, says that she thought she would never act again
At the end of March, the actress Emilia Clarke, known for her role as Daenerys Targaryen in the celebrated series Game of Thrones, reported in an article in The New Yorker magazine that she had suffered two aneurysms after filming the first season of the series. Now, about to premiere the eighth and final season of the HBO fiction, the interpreter is promoting it in some interviews, and in one of them she has shown how those operations were and her time in the hospital.
That happened in early 2011, although she Clarke has not told until eight years later. Now, in an interview with the CBS Sunday Morning program, the actress has shown three images of that operation. In the program you can see the evolution of the young woman, since she was a girl who already liked to get on stage until she became the Mother of Dragons.
During the interview, presenter Tracy Smith asks him about that "February 2011, when you had the worst headache you can remember." "Yeah," she recalls, "I was in the gym and I felt a snap in my brain, like a rubber band snapping. Like a huge pressure inside me and I realized I couldn't stand or walk. In I knew at that moment that I was suffering from brain damage," recalls Clarke.
Luckily, the doctors managed to find the problem in time and she recovered very well, being able to reach the second season of the series. "It was like, 'Really, it's a tiny thing, I'm fine,'" she recalls, now laughing about how she got back on set. "And yes, he really was much better, six weeks later he was on set." However, she was found to have another aneurysm for which she had to be operated on two years later.
"That's when my brain almost died. If a part of your brain doesn't have blood for an instant, it dies, it stops working. So I had that. And I don't know why it happened. And [the doctors] didn't know what I could do have affected, if it will be to the concentration... I always tell them that it affected my taste with men", laughs the actress during the interview. Now more serious, she confesses that she thought it had affected her ability to act on her own. "I thought about it for a long time. It was a huge fear. What if I can't act anymore? It's been my reason for living for a long time."
The recovery process from the first operation was "difficult, but the second one was much harder," she confesses Clarke. "I went through a period of being really low, really," she says. "But you get on set and you have to play this huge woman, and you have to go through the fire. I think that saved me from brooding over my mortality," she smiles.
Now the actress has decided to start a foundation called Same You that helps those who have suffered strokes and brain problems to have access to adequate rehabilitation. "I am going to put my soul, my heart and my whole body into changing aftercare for the sick and giving visibility to these problems that go so unnoticed."
At 32 years old, now the actress faces a new stage. She already claims to be "totally out of the woods", and she faces the end of the series. "I've lived through so many things throughout these ten years of filming working on the series... I'm not just saying goodbye to a character, I'm also saying goodbye to my twenties," she says with a grimace. "It's as exciting as it is sad. I'm looking forward to seeing everything that comes in this decade. I literally can't wait."
