In an emotional speech at Variety’s ‘Power of Women‘ event, Emilia Clarke revealed the intense shame and secrecy that surrounded her two life-threatening brain hemorrhages during the height of her fame on ‘Game of Thrones‘.
The actress, who became a global icon as Daenerys Targaryen, disclosed that she actively hid her medical crises from network executives, fearing that revealing her fragility would result in her character being written out of the hit show. “In 2011, I didn’t want anyone to know about my brain bleeds,” Clarke told the audience. “I was ashamed and overwhelmed by a diagnosis I didn’t understand.”
Emilia Clarke Hid Two Life-Threatening Strokes During Filming and Broadway Debut
Clarke was just 22 years old when she suffered her first subarachnoid hemorrhage, a life-threatening stroke caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain. She had just finished filming the first season of ‘Game of Thrones‘.
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Two years later, at 24, while making her Broadway debut, she suffered a second, even more terrifying hemorrhage that required emergency brain surgery after a procedure went wrong. At the time, her surgeons told her parents she was likely going to die.
Fear of Being Killed Off Show Kept Emilia Clarke From Telling HBO
Despite the mortal danger, Clarke’s primary instinct was to hide the truth from HBO. She explained that she and her family kept the diagnosis a secret from the network until she was certain she wasn’t going to die. “We didn’t even tell HBO until we knew I wasn’t going to die — which, in TV terms, is usually when they kill you off anyway,” she said.
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The fear was paralyzing. Having landed the role of the “Mother of Dragons,” Clarke was terrified that the showrunners would view her as a liability. “I was so ashamed that this thing had happened and that the people who had employed me might see me as weak or see me as something that could be broken,” she previously explained on the How To Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast.
During her recovery, she was fixated on the idea that if she were going to die, she would rather do it in costume than in a hospital bed. While promoting the show at San Diego Comic-Con shortly after one of her surgeries, Clarke remembered thinking, “If I’m going to die, I’ll do it on live TV.”
Emilia Clarke Reflects on Invisible Wound
Speaking fifteen years after her first bleed, Clarke reflected on why she punished herself for so long. Because she was able to walk, talk, and remember her lines, returning to set within weeks of both brain traumas, she assumed she was “fine.”
Looking back, she realizes she was wrong. She ignored extreme fatigue, anxiety, and blackouts, chalking them up to the stress of fame rather than the long-term effects of a traumatic brain injury. “I never had the chance to reflect on what my two brain traumas had done to me,” she said.
That isolation eventually led Clarke to found SameYou in 2019, a charity dedicated to providing rehabilitation for brain injury survivors, a segment of healthcare she describes as a “lottery” that leaves millions feeling like they are “falling off the edge of a cliff without anyone there to catch you.”
Now, with the help of specialists, Clarke says she has finally recovered the energy of her twenties. She offered a final, poignant message to the industry and to survivors: “Recovery is every bit as important as survival.”
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