Emilia Clarke feared losing Game of Thrones role over aneurysms

19 December 2019

Emilia Clarke worried she'd lose her 'Game of Thrones' role due to her two brain aneurysms.

Emilia Clarke

The 33-year-old actress - who portrayed Daenerys Targaryen in the hit HBO series - experienced two health scares in 2011 and again 2013, but she only went public with her ordeal earlier this year, and was devastated that she had to go through the traumatic experience while living in the public eye.

Appearing on Jessie Ware's 'Table Manners' podcast, Emilia admitted: "With the first one, I couldn't let them know what had happened until they knew that I wasn't going to die.

"So it took us three weeks to be like, 'sorry for not answering the old emails. I've just been a bit, you know ... I'm fine!

"'By the way, everything's great. I'm totally fine. I'm going to be back to work, nothing wrong's with me. I'm all good'."

She added: "I just was, and consistently, so scared of being fired for whatever reason.

"So I was just like ... that was just me, more than [them]. I had no idea how taken care of I was."

Emilia recently admitted she "wanted to disappear" when she suffered her second brain aneurysm.

She said: "I do feel like the brain haemorrhages are the literal, physical embodiment of what it is to be attacked on a social media, because I didn't want to look anyone in the eye, and I didn't want anyone to recognise me.

"I wanted to disappear completely, to wipe myself off the face of the earth, because I couldn't handle the level of interaction. Because I felt totally laid bare, totally vulnerable, totally in pain."

And, although she was fighting for her life, the 'Me Before You' star was more concerned about who would see her in hospital than her actual health.

She explained: "[With] the second one, I lost a lot of hope; I lost a lot of optimism. That's insane bad luck.

"But there I was in a f***ing American hospital with drains coming out of my head, fully swollen, full of all the drugs they give you, and all I could think was, 'please don't recognise me, please don't recognise me, please don't recognise me.'"