Emilia Clarke has claimed she was told she'd "disappoint" 'Game of Thrones' fans if she didn't film nude scenes for the show.
Emilia Clarke
The 33-year-old actress starred as Daenerys Targaryen on the hit HBO fantasy drama, and has said she had "fights" over nudity whilst on set, because whilst she wanted to keep a sheet over herself during some scenes, she was told fans would be upset if she didn't strip off.
She explained: "I know too much about nudity waivers. I mean, this way back in the day. So, now things are very, very different and I'm a lot more savvy about what I'm comfortable with and what I am OK with doing. Like, I've had fights on set before where I'm like, 'No! Sheet stays up' and they're like, 'You don't want to disappoint your 'Game of Thrones' fans' and I'm like, 'F**k you.' "
But Emilia also took a moment to defend the nudity shown in the show's early episodes, because she believes showing her character being victimised by her brother Viserys Targaryen (Harry Lloyd) helped fans empathise with her.
She added: "With this character, I've had so many people say so many different things to me about the nudity, specifically about Khalessi's nudity in the show and people wouldn't care if you hadn't seen her be abused. You wouldn't f***ing care."
'Game of Thrones' came as one of Emilia's first roles when she was "fresh from drama school", and although she viewed the nudity in the first episodes as a "catch", she strived to do it because she thought it was "needed".
She said: "Obviously I took the job and they sent me the pilot. They sent me the scripts and I was reading them and I was ... it was like, 'Oh, there's the catch! OK. All right then.' But I'd come fresh from drama school and I was like, 'Approach this as a job. If it's in the script, then it's clearly needed. Then this is what this is and I'm gonna make sense of it and this is my job and that's what I'm gonna do and everything's gonna be cool.'
"I'm floating through this first season. I have no idea what I'm doing. I have no idea what any of this is. I've never been on a film set like this before. I'd been on a film set twice before then and now I'm on a film set completely naked with all of these people ... So 'whatever I'm feeling is wrong. I'm gonna go cry in the bathroom and then I'm gonna come back and we're gonna do the scene and it's gonna be completely fine.'"
Emilia filmed several of her nude and intimate scenes with Jason Momoa, who played her on-screen husband Khal Drogo, and praised the actor for doing his best to make sure she was comfortable.
Speaking on Dax Shepard's 'Armchair Expert' podcast, she said: "He took care of me too. In an environment where I didn't know I needed to be taken care of. It's only now that I realise how fortunate I was with that ... He was always like, 'Can we get her a f***ing robe?! Can we get her a goddamn robe?! She's shivering!' Like, it was a lot of that."
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