She is best known for playing the fearless Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, in Game of Thrones.
But Emilia Clarke says she is “petrified” ahead of her UK stage debut in Chekhov’s The Seagull.
“I’m profoundly aware of the fact that there will be people who love Game of Thrones and are seeing it for that,” she tells the BBC.
“It’s 10 times more frightening because there’ll be people wanting to go and say, ‘Well she can only act on camera, she clearly can’t act on stage,’ which is obviously the biggest fear.”
But the British actress also hopes that by appearing in a play
written in 1895, about a group of lonely Russians living on an isolated
country estate, she will encourage a different audience to go to the
theatre.
“Hopefully they’ll come and go, ‘We just came to see the
Mother of Dragons, oh how frustrating, she’s not on a dragon, this isn’t
what I paid for.’ Spoiler: I’m not on a dragon at any point during this
play,” she laughs.
“But hopefully what they get, as a kind of
little extra, is that they get to enjoy this play that they might not have
seen otherwise.”
Clarke plays Nina opposite co-star Tom Rhys
Harries, who portrays Trigorin.
But there is another layer of
anxiety. After a frantic decade in which Clarke became a global superstar,
had two brain haemorrhages and lost her beloved father to cancer, finally
appearing in the West End is daunting because “it’s something I’ve wanted
for so long”.
“It’s frightening because it’s a dream of mine finally realised,” she
says.
All the more so because the production was due to open in
March 2020, but closed after just four preview performances when the
pandemic shut theatres.
“There is no higher art than theatre,”
says the 35-year-old. “I adore it. I absolutely love it. I feel happiest,
safest, most at home.”
This might seem odd for an actress who has
appeared on stage professionally only once before, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s
on Broadway in 2013. It did not go well, with Ben Brantley in The New York
Times describing her performance as the glamorous Holly Golightly as “an
under-age debutante trying very, very hard to pass for a sophisticated
grown-up”.
Meanwhile, David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter criticised the
“miscasting” of Clarke, writing: “There’s neither softness nor fragility in
her grating Holly.”
It was a “catastrophic failure”, Clarke
cheerfully tells me.
“It was just not ready. Was I ready? No, I
was definitely not ready. I was a baby. I was so young and so
inexperienced.”
Clarke found fame on screen, cast in HBO’s
fantasy drama Game of Thrones in 2010, when only two years out of drama
school. The show quickly became notorious for its explicit sex and violence,
and Clarke, who was 23 when she started filming, has spoken about crying
before shooting certain “terrifying” n-de scenes.
But when asked
now if she feels exploited or angry looking back at what happened, she picks
her words very carefully. “Regret isn’t something I do. It’s not something I
like.
“I have since not done very much nudity. Read into that
what you will.”
And just in case of any doubt for those going to
see her on stage: “There’s no nudity in The Seagull. No, no, no.”
Clarke
always wanted to be an actress. In The Seagull, Nina is a hopeless romantic
who also dreams of being a famous actress. But amid a growing clamour for
actors to have lived experience of the characters they are playing, are
there any roles she would avoid for risk of causing offence?
“The
trickiest thing is, as an actor, the whole point is that you get to try on
different characters. Every actor wants to stay as far away from a
pigeonholing career as they can.
“So to just say, ‘I’m only ever
going to play aspiring actresses’, as an example, is probably a bad route
for me to take and something that would end up being unfulfilling.”
Nonetheless,
Clarke is savvy enough to know that “we live in a cancel culture” and “it’s
an incredibly hot topic”.
She says: “If me being in something was
preventing someone with a lived experience of being in something, I would
100% not do it.”
Her co-star in The Seagull, Daniel Monks, is
disabled. A botched operation in his native Australia when he was 11 left
him with a paralysed right arm and a partially paralysed right leg, “similar
to a cerebral palsy leg”, he explains. He is an articulate advocate for
disabled actors.
“It is important that only disabled actors play
disabled roles in a similar way that I think it’s important that only trans
actors play trans roles,” he says.
“Obviously in terms of the
philosophy of acting, the ideal is that it pretends and everyone gets to
play everyone. But in this industry and culturally, it’s been forever that
straight, white, cis, able-bodied mostly men get to play everything. And
then people who are part of minorities not only don’t get to play anything,
they don’t even play themselves.
“I personally know how damaging
it is to seelack of representation or inauthentic representation. It really
shapes the way that you see your place in society.”
