Emilia Clarke: ‘The best place in the world is backstage at a theatre’


O

n 16 March 2020, Emilia Clarke went on stage with the cast of
The Seagull. Previews had started, and the thespian was about to make her much-anticipated Westward End debut after a decade starring in some of the biggest films and Telly shows imaginable. At the half-60 minutes mark, everything stopped: the authorities had decreed that theatres were to shut with immediate effect. Lost and adrift, everyone huddled into a pub, which was filled with crowds from the surrounding theatres. “My lawyer from America was calling almost something,” recalls Clarke now. “And she was like, ‘Go out of the pub!’ We had no idea of the enormity of it.”

Events, of course, got in the style. Ii-and-a-chip years on, we meet at
The Seagull
rehearsal studios in due south London, a cavernous onetime warehouse with a skeletal phase ready up in the eye of it. Not much is known about Jamie Lloyd’due south product of the classic Chekhov play, but hopefully it isn’t too much of a spoiler to say – based on a diorama sitting on a side table – that it volition characteristic some chairs. “At that place are no distractions,” says Clarke. “We don’t take a samovar. There’south no linen. At that place aren’t any copse. No ane’s in crinoline. What we’re doing could be seen every bit quite radical. I think it might be Marmite.”

The actor is no stranger to the divisive ability of art – on which more later – just the spare and lean product marks a pronounced change from the jobs she has done since existence catapulted into superstardom past
Game of Thrones
in 2011. Post-obit the phenomenally successful HBO series, in which she portrayed Daenerys Targaryen, Clarke has starred alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in
Terminator Genisys, played Han Solo’s love interest in
Solo: A Star Wars Story
and dressed as an elf in Paul Feig’s Emma Thompson-scripted romcom
Final Christmas. She has won a Bafta Britannia award and been nominated for numerous Emmy, Screen Actors Guild and Critics’ Choice awards; in 2019, she was one of
Time’s
100 most influential people.

Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones.



Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones.
Photograph: HBO

Today, Clarke is sitting alone in the java expanse, perched on the border of a low sofa; she looks immaculate in a green blazer, well-baked white trousers and a smattering of necklaces and gilt rings, a burst of tropical colour in the otherwise drab room. She exudes the kind of understated glamour that befits a flick star fronting a global skincare make, with huge, arresting eyes that accept upwardly a significant proportion of her face. Information technology’s the start of the third calendar week of rehearsals, and there is understandably a hint of nervousness most anything disrupting the run: everyone tests every day, and we begin the interview with an bad-mannered, 2020-style elbow-bump.

Theatre’s reliance on bodies in a room together feels heightened in the historic period of Covid. “It definitely intensifies the feel of being on stage,” says Clarke. “In stage piece of work, it’s every cell of your body, information technology’southward a 360 feeling. On screen, it’due south then often your left eyeball, your correct shoulder – information technology fractures yous equally a human.” The terminal time she performed on phase was in her 2013 Broadway debut, an ill-fated product of
Breakfast at Tiffany’southward
which she has previously described as “slightly catastrophic” (the
New York Times
verdict: “this particular soufflé seems doomed never to rise”). But that was and then. “Chalk and cheese doesn’t even sum up the differences between that play and this. I experience similar I’g
meant
to be in this. I’chiliad not sure I was meant to be in the other one,” she adds with a cackle, the start of many.

Clarke is personable and engaging company, her answers thoughtful and considered; there’s a seriousness about the style she thinks about her work, but in that location’southward always a joke close to the surface, a self-deprecating bated when she feels her answers are insufficiently original. Several times during our conversation, her calm and stately intonation gives way to a funny voice or an impression (a representative sample: New Yawk stallholder, sceptical cockney, musical theatre kid, exhausted goblin). If this was an audition, you’d rent her on the spot.

Clarke has been trying to return to the stage for most a decade, but because of her high-wattage film choices, theatres causeless she wasn’t interested. Her amanuensis suggested sitting down with some directors, who all jumped at the chance; 1 of them was Jamie Lloyd, who offered her the role of ingenue thespian Nina, in an Anya Reiss accommodation that relocates
The Seagull
to present-day England. “Nina’s up at that place with Juliet – she’southward a part that many actors before me have done,” says Clarke. “She’southward 1 of the few roles Chekhov wrote who is as hopeful at the start every bit she is at the terminate, despite the savage experiences she lives through. And the thing that makes her experience better is her arts and crafts, and that’s a beautiful matter for an actor – but it tin feel quite meta at times, for certain.”

“Information technology’southward a very painful, very delicate play,” says Lloyd, who I speak to on the phone a few days later. “And and so I thought of Emilia – I ever call back you never really see her ‘acting’. Whatsoever she does is so honest and thoughtful and true, and there’s this amazing warmth which felt appropriate for Nina.” He has merely finished a rapturously received, hip-hop-inspired product of
Cyrano de Bergerac
starring James McAvoy, but this is very much an ensemble piece. “What I honey most information technology is it’s not a very showy West Stop debut,” he says. “It’s not this big tour-de-forcefulness leading role. It’southward unexpected in its quiet simplicity and precision – I think it’southward brave. Sometimes people don’t realise how difficult information technology is to dig deep and connect.”

Clarke’s British stage debut comes with an boosted layer of emotional significance. Her male parent, Peter Clarke, was a sound designer from Wolverhampton who worked in every theatre in the Due west Terminate; 1 of his beginning plays was at the Playhouse (where the play was originally going to be) and he worked for many years at the Harold Pinter theatre (where it will exist this summer). Press nighttime is ii days before the ceremony of his death in 2016. “Information technology’southward in the front of my mind every mean solar day. Any attribute of my work that I tin relate back to my dad, I volition,” she says. “I’m gonna try not to get teary even thinking well-nigh it. It’southward quite ridiculous. It’s been virtually six years. And it’s all the same but every bit – it gets more painful. People don’t tell you this near grief, but it just seems to get – not worse, but information technology becomes so much more than present.”

With Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator Genisys.



With Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator Genisys (2015).
Photograph: Paramount Pictures/Allstar

When Clarke was iii years one-time her father took her to see a musical he was working on,
Show Boat; she became enamoured with that world, and got it into her head that she would get an player. A “classic sound designer”, her begetter warned her: “Are you prepare to be unemployed for the balance of your life? Considering that’s what information technology’s gonna be.” She did non listen to his advice, just his support for her never wavered. “He just really loved me. My dad gave me my mystical, magical dearest of the theatre. To me, the best place in the world is backstage at a theatre – backstage anywhere is where I experience most at dwelling house.”

He must have been very proud of her.

“Aye. He was a very tranquillity human. A very sensitive man. Only I’d like to think that he is. I recollect he’due south gonna be with me every nighttime.” Her eyes fill with tears. “Sorry.”



E

milia Isobel Euphemia Rose Clarke was born in London in 1986 to Peter and Jennifer Clarke, a businesswoman. She had an idyllic babyhood in Oxfordshire, getting her beginning lead part in a play anile five at the Squirrel schoolhouse, Oxford. When she finished schoolhouse, she applied to study drama merely was rejected; she took a year out, waitressing and backpacking, before being accepted past Drama Center London. Her first tv set role was in BBC soap
Doctors, followed by Telly film
Triassic Attack, for which she was named a
Screen International
Star of Tomorrow.

Her begetter’s prediction was non far off: for a year, she supported herself working in a pub, a call eye and a museum, only interim roles were difficult to come up by. Until, in 2010, Clarke auditioned for fantasy serial
Game of Thrones
subsequently an expensive pilot needed to exist reshot. All contenders for the role prepared 2 scenes: one from the beginning, when Daenerys is a meek, fearful girl, and one from the season finale, when she has become the “mother of dragons”. “Many were good at the start scene. A few were good at the second. Merely Emilia made both work,” says David Benioff, co-creator, showrunner and writer of
Game of Thrones
(along with DB Weiss), over email. “And she made them work far better than the words on the folio. Information technology was impossible to imagine anyone else in the role: she was our one true queen. And frankly, she just has that mysterious quality that makes an actor special, that makes you want to watch them. When you find someone who matches that star quality with serious acting chops… well, you rent them.”

Her co-star Iain Glen, who played Daenerys’s adviser and companion Ser Jorah Mormont, was with Clarke from the first. “She was admittedly thrown in at the deep finish of this mega HBO serial, and it must take been really frightening,” he tells me on the telephone. At that place was a not bad nervousness around the place at the start, especially amid the producers. “Everyone looks back in hindsight and thinks
Thrones
was just such an enormous global success, but really, when nosotros began, there was a lot of trepidation, and Emilia would have been admittedly in the sights of the powers that be as to whether she could exercise information technology or non.”

Indira Varma (Arkadina), Emilia Clarke (Nina) and Tom Rhys Harries (Trigorin) during rehearsals for The Seagull.



Indira Varma (Arkadina), Emilia Clarke (Nina) and Tom Rhys Harries (Trigorin) during rehearsals for The Seagull.
Photo: Marc Brenner

What happened next was a whirlwind. From the release of season ane onwards,
Game of Thrones
became a bigger and bigger hit, breaking record after record, going on to win 59 Emmy awards and attracting an average of 44.two 1000000 viewers per episode. Looking dorsum on it now, Clarke says she merely truly understood the scale of the prove’s success after it ended, something she is grateful for. “I had nothing to compare it to. I was as young as they come, as wildly unaware and new as you could possibly imagine.”

From the get-go, she was plagued with self-dubiety. “My only concern was, ‘I’chiliad gonna go fired, someone’s gonna find me out. Someone’due south gonna tell me I’k shit at my job and I need to go dwelling,’” she says, her vocalisation rising as if in a frenzy. For years, she was convinced that her character would exist killed or that she would be replaced. “Emilia has
no idea
how good she is,” says Glen. “She really is very innocent of how wonderful she is. And that’due south a lovely quality. Just you have to be conscientious information technology doesn’t undo you, that information technology doesn’t finish y’all from having confidence.”

As the seasons progressed, Clarke became more assured, both of her talent and her ability to human activity on her ain terms. She has spoken in the past about feeling pressured to exercise nudity from the very first episode, and and so existence constantly questioned about it in interviews. With the ascent of intimacy coordinators and movements such every bit #TimesUp, she says, things are slowly irresolute. “There’s at present at least a conversation people are able to join, and highlight if they are always feeling not OK in a sure scenario, which was very far from the case when I was doing it.”

Only, overall, she thinks about the decade she spent on the show with pride and amore. “I wait back on
Game of Thrones
like anyone else would look back on high school. It was my entire education: it informed my understanding of the manufacture, I learned virtually press, I learned about work. Information technology gave me my boulder of understanding of what it ways to be an thespian.” Along with Glen, who was a sounding board whenever she needed advice or reassurance, Clarke made many lasting friendships. “I got my crew from there. The fondness I experience for everyone is something that will never go away. Rose Leslie is someone I speak to every week. And Kit [Harington], obviously. We’re very, very close.”

I thing that comes upward again and once again when speaking to Clarke’due south co-stars and collaborators is how deeply she cares for those she works with. “She’s an incredibly generous, kind person,” says Glen. “It’s very easy for actors to go somewhat self-absorbed, specially when they’re taking on such a big matter. But she was always the ane who was looking afterward people, getting bandage meals together – that actually binds a group of actors.” Lloyd agrees: “She’due south a very unassuming, placidity, skillful person. She’south the outset with the boxes of doughnuts for someone’due south birthday – information technology’due south very meaningful. Most people don’t exercise that. She’s thinking virtually other people all the fourth dimension, making certain anybody’southward having a proficient time.”



Westward

chapeau viewers didn’t know about Clarke, however, was what she had been dealing with behind the scenes. In March 2019, she wrote a remarkable essay in the
New Yorker
detailing ii brain aneurysms she suffered in 2011 and 2013. “That’s the scariest affair I’ve ever washed,” she says, her tone sombre. “I was never going to do it. Then I realised I might be able to help someone – fifty-fifty if the story was gonna assist two people feel better, I had to do it.” For a long time, she worried information technology would exist dismissed equally attention-seeking. “What I was slightly obsessed with was people going,
Wah wah, celebrity sob story, nosotros don’t care,’ which they would be completely within their rights to experience. But that didn’t happen, and information technology was just incredible. But it’due south nonetheless exposing, it’s still hard. I’ve spoken about it and then much now, and yet it’s weird to take normalised an experience that was so hard.”

In 2019 Clarke, who is an ambassador for the Royal College of Nursing, founded SameYou, a charity that supports the recovery of brain injury and stroke survivors. “The first matter you feel when you’ve had a brain injury is that you lot are no longer yourself,” she says. “And that is the single scariest matter that could perhaps happen, because you can’t escape yourself.” Later the get-go of 2 life-saving surgeries, for a calendar week Clarke suffered from aphasia, a condition that impairs speech and the ability to recollect words; at i point she was unable to remember her own name. “I thought the fleck in my brain that had gone was my ability to act. That was the thing I was most worried nigh. If it was, then I got it dorsum – I think,” she deadpans, summoning a smile.

With Sam Claflin in Me Before You (2016).



With Sam Claflin in Me Earlier You (2016).
Photograph: MGM/Allstar

While people take been overwhelmingly supportive in the wake of her
New Yorker
slice, she still gets the occasional insensitive question. She leans into the dictaphone, enunciating emphatically: “Just every bit a heads up? With anyone who has had a brain injury – don’t make a ‘Eugh’ face,” – she mimes a pitying worried face up – “and
don’t
ask them if they’re OK. That is the nigh insulting thing you tin can say. If they’re stood there talking to you, what do you call up?” She quickly caveats that this is understandable, given that brain injury is then rarely spoken about. “I am incredibly lucky, because I saw a scan the other day, and I’m missing near three-quarters of my brain.” She pauses. “And I’m sat hither talking to you, so… apparently we don’t demand very much.”

At that place is oft a sense that, after a serious illness, a person’s priorities and sense of purpose will change. This was non the example for Clarke. “It made me very, very scared for a number of years. Very scared I was going to die all the time, like I’d cheated death and it was coming for me. But it didn’t make me experience like ‘Grab life past the balls’ in any way, shape or course. It didn’t have a profound ‘Now I tin practice anything’ event.” What did exercise that was losing her male parent. “That’s the thing that fabricated me really understand and analyse and expect at the idea of mortality and living and dying and what’due south important and what’south not.”

Another thing that had a tangible issue on her was the enforced stillness of the pandemic. “I think I went into an existential crisis pit of despair. I live on my own, and it was very hard. I establish it really, really difficult, as did so many people.” With the play on hold, and her film projects bumped years into the futurity, she was left with nothing to exercise for the first time in her life. She did poetry readings, charity fundraising, wrote a comic (Chiliad.O.One thousand.: Mother of Madness) besides every bit stories she is “also scared to bear witness anyone just yet”. But, after a lifetime of feeling like someone had duct-taped her foot to the gas pedal, she was able to focus on the here and now. She started doing yoga every morning and meditating every night (“Oh, extra does meditation, what a surprise,” she berates herself), and talked with her friends for hours on the phone.

A “massive bookworm”, she spent a lot of time reading; some of her contempo favourites take been Susanna Clarke’s
Piranesi,
Cloud Cuckoo Country
by Anthony Doerr and Richard Powers’s
Bewilderment, too as Meg Bricklayer’s
Sorrow and Bliss
(“My mate Lola wanted to infringe it and I’ve never been so reticent to manus a volume over. I was like, ‘No, no, you don’t empathize, this has got my soul inside it’”). She also became obsessed with baking, and now does a Mon bake for the cast; this week’s is a strawberry and rhubarb crumble cake. “That’s how I show my love to people. I bake them cakes.” (Her cakes are “pretty amazing”, Lloyd confirms.)

At the height of the pandemic, walking her dachshund Ted (very much a “pre-lockdown dog”, she is at pains to point out) was a lifeline. “I just didn’t come across anyone because I lived on my ain. Fame’due south the shittest thing in the globe and I don’t wish information technology on my worst enemy. It’s horrible. Information technology forces y’all to look down all the fourth dimension. So it was very liberating doing these dog walks on my own beingness like,” – she smiles manically –
‘Hi!’” She is now based in “permit’s telephone call it London, for the sake of my stalkers”, afterwards a stint in Los Angeles, and is determined to live as close to a normal life as possible. “I made a choice many years ago, and I’ve stuck to my guns. I don’t have a security baby-sit, I don’t
non
go places because I call back I’m going to exist recognised, I get most my daily life as if it weren’t the case.”

Emilia Clarke photographed in London for the Observer New Review by Pål Hansen. June 2022



Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Observer

I remark that most news stories about her are some permutations of “Emilia Clarke goes for a walk” or “Emilia Clarke posts on Instagram” (where her 27 million followers are usually treated to Clinique or charity endorsements and pictures of Ted; she has a penchant for a dorky hashtag: #teddyturnstwo, #goodvibestooneandall).

“Completely. That’due south the other thing: I’m inherently irksome. I’m incredibly dull. I really live a very boring, very dull life.”

Or, you manage to proceed your private life private.

“Yeah. I do have a private life. And at that place’s plenty that I’ve done that no one knows. The way I do that is by but doing information technology. I also am not a very controversial homo existence, boringly plenty.”

One thing she is happy to talk over is the moment that stands out as the most bizarre she has experienced over the years: when Brad Pitt bid $120,000 to scout an episode of
Game of Thrones
with her. Information technology was Sean Penn’due south annual gala for Republic of haiti, and she was surrounded by “creme de la creme celebrities”, and no one was bidding. And so – incredulous stage whisper – “Brad fucking Pitt
comes to my rescue! I idea I was going to spontaneously combust.” (He was outbid by Clarke’s friend, much to her chagrin.) “It was, to this twenty-four hour period, the strangest, nigh glorious moment of my adult life.”

But her relationship with fame has been a complicated 1. Aside from the stalkers, she has been woken up on a flight for a selfie, and was once asked for i while in the middle of a panic attack, subsequently which she implemented a no-selfies rule. What she misses most is the ability to have a chat with a stranger on an equal footing. “I’ve really struggled with information technology, because I like talking to people.” She tells a story most walking into a store recently where the server was evidently bellyaching about something, merely, every bit shortly as they saw who she was, plastered a beatific smile on their face and rushed to her assistance. “You’re similar, ‘No, no, no,
be
in the bad mood. I’m merely normal. Delight, don’t.’” She clasps her hands together, her expressive eyebrows knitting diagonally upwards. “Fame has afforded me many wonderful things. But I don’t understand why anyone would want information technology.”

In that location is as well the thorny question of
Game of Thrones’ infamous final season; it was roundly criticised for its rushed pacing, with many fans objecting to Daenerys’s transformation into murderous tyrant at the end. When Clarke read the script, it took her some time to come to terms with it. “It was definitely a challenge. I walked out my door, took my keys, forgot my phone and merely kept walking.” But in the end, she accepted it. “I totally understand and respect why they did it. There’s a depressing reality of how information technology ended that actually feels based in truth, which no one wants for their favourite fantasy show. I’m not certain in what other direction she could take gone.” She now sees the extreme fan reaction as “the ultimate flattery – no matter what we did, we would have upset people because it was ending”.

As Kate in Last Christmas.



As Kate in Concluding Christmas.
Photograph: Universal Pictures

She is even less fazed by the raft of one-star reviews for the likable if somewhat misguided
Last Christmas. “Honestly, information technology boils down to – I shouldn’t be maxim this, but fuck ’em. I’1000 not living and dying past what a reviewer I’ve never met thinks near a picture or a TV bear witness I was in.” She looks down, backtracking a little. “Of course it’s always heartbreaking when that happens, because find me an actor whose entire purpose in life isn’t to be liked.” Despite the critical panning,
Concluding Christmas
was a hit with audiences and is now a cult classic. “Information technology’due south kind of the ultimate ‘fuck you,’” she smiles. “Art is meant to divide – I’d much rather exercise something that people either
loved
or
hated
than were like, [Larry David voice] ‘Eh – certain, didn’t actually hate it, didn’t really love information technology.’”

Next, she’ll be in sci-fi romcom
The Pod Generation
aslope Chiwetel Ejiofor (“elation, start to end – couldn’t be more excited”), in Terry Pratchett-inspired blitheness
The Amazing Maurice, and Curiosity TV show
Cloak-and-dagger Invasion
(“It’s gonna be expert! That’s pretty much all I’chiliad allowed to say”); she is set to start filming
McCarthy
every bit the wife of the Republican senator, played by Michael Shannon. There are also some projects in development with her production company, Magical Thinking Pictures, including ane that is “very close”.

Around us, the sounds of the theatre are burbling up as the rest of the bandage and crew start to go far: Jamie Lloyd, boyfriend
Thrones
alumna Indira Varma. Information technology’south time to wrap up, and then I inquire Clarke a last question: what communication would she requite herself at the start of her career?

She answers immediately. “The just advice I would accept wanted to hear: ‘It’s all going to be all right.’”

And off she goes, to unwrap her baked goods. A small crowd starts to gather effectually her, inspecting the contents of the Tupperware and making beholden noises. You get the impression that this – backstage at rehearsals, surrounded by her fellow cast members, picking up where they left off 2 years ago – is exactly where she wants to exist.

  • The Seagull
    runs at Harold Pinter theatre, London SW1, 29 June–10 September

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/jun/26/emilia-clarke-games-of-thrones-last-christmas-seagull-the-best-place-in-the-world-is-backstage-at-a-theatre

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