Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke is opening up about that time she almost died after suffering two brain hemorrhages.
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The actor said on the How To Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast that she thought she was meant to die after suffering a second brain hemorrhage. “I was just convinced that I had cheated death and I was meant to die,” Clarke, 39, said. “Every day, that’s all I could think about.”
Clarke played Daenerys on the hit fantasy show Game of Thrones. She suffered her first brain hemorrhage just after the first season when she was at the gym.
“The closest thing to describe it is imagine an elastic band just snapping around your brain,” she said. “This insane pressure.” She vomited in the bathroom. “In that moment, I knew I was being brain-damaged,” she said.
Clarke recovered from the brain hemorrhage. Instead of her health, she became focused on promising executives that she would be ready to film Game of Thrones again.
“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,” Clarke said.
‘Game of Thrones’ Star Thought She Was Going to Die
Fast forward to New York, Clarke was performing a Broadway play when she suffered a second brain hemorrhage. Doctors rushed her to emergency surgery but they thought she was going to die.
“My parents were waiting for me, and the doctors would come down every half an hour and say, ‘We think she’s going to die,’ ” Clarke recalled. The recovery process was hard. “The biggest thing that happened to me with the second brain hemorrhage was I shut down emotionally.”
Following the incidents, she became super sensitive and fearful of another issue with her brain.
“When you have a brain injury, you move around in the world differently,” Clarke said. “You become very sensitive.” She was scared of another hemorrhage. Ultimately, she became comfortable with her own mortality.
“Without my work, I don’t know what I would have done,” she also said.