Emilia Clarke has revealed a terrifying moment from her ‘Game of Thrones‘ promotion days, when a headache before a live MTV interview made her believe another brain hemorrhage was happening.
Just weeks after her second brain hemorrhage operation, the actress was back at San Diego Comic-Con, trying to promote the show while thinking she might die on live television.
Emilia Clarke’s Headache At Comic-Con Sparked A Terrifying Fear
Clarke opened up about the frightening memory during an appearance on the How To Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast. She explained that after her second brain hemorrhage, even a simple headache could send her straight back into fear because she worried the medical emergency was happening again.
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“When you have a brain injury, you move around in the world differently,” Clarke said. “You become very sensitive.” That sensitivity followed her into one of the busiest and most public spaces for a television star: San Diego Comic-Con. Clarke said she attended Comic-Con around six weeks after the operation and continued promoting ‘Game of Thrones‘.
“And so we were promoting the show. We were at San Diego Comic-Con. It’s wild. It’s crazy. And I started getting a headache,” she recalled. After surviving two brain hemorrhages, it felt like a warning. “Anytime I got any kind of headache, I was like, that’s it, it’s happening. It’s happening again,” she said.
The fear grew worse when Clarke had to continue with her press schedule. Her publicist told her they needed to do a live interview with MTV, but Clarke was already convinced something was wrong. “And my publicist was like, right, we’ve got to go do this live interview with MTV. And I was like, I think I’m going to die. I think, I think it’s happening,” she said.
Still, Clarke pushed herself forward and went into the interview. “And in my head, I was like, if I’m going to die, I’ll do it on live TV,” she said.
‘Game Of Thrones’ Fame Couldn’t Help Clarke’s Constant Fear Of Death
Emilia Clarke says surviving two brain hemorrhages during her years on ‘Game of Thrones‘ left her convinced that she was “meant to die.” “I was just convinced that I had cheated death and I was meant to die,” Clarke added. “Every day, that’s all I could think about.” At the time, her life and career had changed suddenly, and she said she had been under stress when she collapsed during a workout at a London gym.
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“The closest thing to describe it is imagine an elastic band just snapping around your brain,” she said. “This insane pressure.” Clarke remembered crawling to the bathroom and vomiting from the pain before realizing that something was seriously wrong. “In that moment, I knew I was being brain-damaged,” she said.
After the second hemorrhage, Clarke said she struggled emotionally in a way she had not experienced after the first one. “The biggest thing that happened to me with the second brain hemorrhage was I shut down emotionally,” she explained. She described feeling hypersensitive and disconnected from the outside world because her body and brain had failed her in a way other people could not easily see.
Clarke also revealed that she did not give herself much compassion during that period because she viewed the experience as a personal failure. “I did not take care of myself. I did not give myself any grace,” she said. “Everything was like, ‘You failed you.’”
Over time, Clarke’s perspective has changed. In 2019, she founded the brain injury recovery charity SameYou with her mother, Jennifer, and she has since spoken more openly about the loneliness and isolation many survivors face after brain injuries.
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