Emilia Clarke "completely broke down" during her last day on the 'Game of Thrones' set.
Emilia Clarke
The 32-year-old actress has played Daenerys Targaryen on the HBO fantasy drama since it began in 2011, and has said that during her final day of filming for the show's upcoming eighth and final season - which airs next month - she couldn't keep herself from bursting into tears.
Emilia admitted that she was trying to give a "little speech" to the cast and crew at the time, but found herself overcome with emotions just "three words in".
She said: "I started to do a little speech, not because I'm a pretentious actor, but because every time we said goodbye to a character, showrunners David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] would give us a gift and the crew would be around and everyone would stop and you'd sort of say a few words and it was really beautiful.
"I mean, I got three words in before I just completely broke down. You just hold it in and you're holding it in and you're holding it in, and then I just burst into tears like a complete idiot.
"Then we cracked open the champagne, but it was then that I realised that alcohol is a depressant! So it was less a celebratory champagne, it was more kind of like, [pretends to sob] 'We did it! We got to the finish line!'"
Whilst Emilia has loved her time as the Mother of Dragons over the past eight years, she admits the long stint on the show was "the hardest shooting" she's ever done, and describe the end of the programme as a "metaphorical undoing of the bra".
She added to Harper's Bazaar: "I think ending it was just the mother of all releases. It was just the metaphorical undoing of the bra, except it's like a 10-year experience.
"[It's] the hardest shooting I'll ever do. It is so physical and you're in a corset! You've got the physical places of where you are, the weather is so extreme, and the hours are really long and there's so much tension in each character towards the end. There's so much tension in the room, and you're concentrating so hard. It's strenuous."
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