Emilia Clarke was "deeply paranoid" that she'd never be able to act again following her life-threatening brain aneurysm in 2011.
Emilia Clarke
The 32-year-old actress revealed last month she had almost died twice after she suffered life-threatening brain aneurysms after filming wrapped on the first season of 'Game of Thrones' - on which she plays Daenerys Targaryen - and has said that for a "long time" after her emergency surgery, she thought she'd have lost the ability to act.
Emilia explained that during her second aneurysm, a part of her brain was starved of oxygen for more than a minute, which caused that section to die, and she was left "paranoid" that it would be the part of her brain that allowed her to recall lines and act.
She said: "So, they [the doctors] literally were looking at the brain and being like, 'Well, we think it could be - could be her concentration, it could be her peripheral vision. For a very long time, I thought it was my ability to act...that was a deep paranoia."
But the beauty - who is now fully recovered - was able to joke with the doctors at the time, even recalling that she told them she'd lost the part of her brain which housed her "taste in men".
And Emilia says the thing that saved her from her paranoia was getting back on the 'Game of Thrones' set, because she threw herself into her work to stop herself "considering her own mortality".
Speaking in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning - which is set to air this Sunday (07.04.19) - she said: "You go on the set, and you play a badass character, and you walk through fire, and you speak to hundreds of people, and you're being asked to be - to work as hard as you possibly can.
"And that became the thing that just saved me from considering my own mortality, yeah."
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