Emilia Clarke 'cheated death' on Game of Thrones as she dealt with brain aneurysms

Clarke pulled back the curtain on a terrifying time on How to Fail with Elizabeth Day

It would be the understatement of the century to say that Game of Thrones launched several careers when it premiered on April 11, 2011. An adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones was a pop culture sensation that, even now, continues to thrive through several spin-offs such as House of the Dragon and, more recently, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

However, it wasn’t all easygoing for the cast, some of who dedicated 10 years of their lives to the eight-season fantasy epic. In a recent interview with How to Fail With Elizabeth Day, Emilia Clarke, known for playing the charismatic and regal Daenerys Targaryen, opened up about the impact her two brain aneurysms had during the show's first (2011) and second (2013) seasons.

Clarke suffered her first aneurysm shortly after wrapping the first season of Game of Thrones, which required her to undergo surgery. While she recovered, Clarke was told by doctors that there was a smaller rupture on the other side of her brain, which was too small to operate on. However, in 2013, now living in New York, Clarke’s doctors found during a brain scan that it had doubled in size and required surgery immediately. Unfortunately, there were complications in the surgery, which, while Clarke got through admirably, left her feeling as though she had “cheated death.”

Even then, apart for the show's showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, Clarke didn’t reveal the extent of her injury to anyone involved with the show.

“I felt like it was my duty to say ‘I didn’t die, so everything’s fine!’” Clarke shared on the podcast. “I shut down emotionally. [...] It became this thing where I just couldn’t look anyone in the eye.”

Yet after such a traumatic event, Clarke’s recovery was far from painless. She had to relearn how to speak and walk, and while she was eager to get back to Game of Thrones and other work, it was a complex time for the actor. No matter whether she was at home or in public, Clarke would get nervous the moment a headache set in, citing a time when, during a live interview with MTV, she was convinced something bad was going to happen.

However, while Clarke readily admits that she rushed back to work too soon, her promoting Game of Thrones at San Diego Comic-Con six weeks after her life-saving surgery was, in fact, helpful. “Without my work, I don’t know what I would have done,” Clarke shared.

Game of Thrones may have ended on a poor note for Clarke’s character Daenerys — and fans still speculate whether or not the cast were pleased with the controversial eighth season — Clarke admitted that she has some distance from the series now, and her answer to how she feels about the series now “changes every year.”

“It was way too big for me to comprehend even a year after it happened,” Clarke revealed. “It’s like thinking about high school, because it was 10 years of my life. Those friendships and relationships that you have become like family. [...] There were difficult times, and there were wonderful times, but there was life!”

“Looking back on Game of Thrones, the enormity of it for me is a lived experience of what I felt filming it. [...] That was like lightning in a bottle. That was my youth! This extraordinary thing, and I was a part of it.”