A film career amid ‘Thrones’
Emilia Clarke says it’s ‘even scarier’ to talk Han Solo film than ‘Game of Thrones’
While it’s a pleasure to talk to Emilia Clarke, you just know there are certain things she can’t reveal — like what will happen on the seventh season of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” that’s arriving in July, or anything about the plot of the Han Solo movie she is filming for Disney, which is set for a holiday release next year.
But she can deftly segue into discussing her career ambitions and the other films she’s in, such as “Voice From the Stone,” an indie she made two years ago that opens Friday.
“I first read the script five years ago, and I absolutely fell in love with it,” Clarke says. “I’m a sucker for a good script, because I’m an avid reader.”
Set in 1950s Tuscany, the film stars Clarke as a children’s nurse named Verena, who has been hired by Klaus (Marton Csokas), the artist father of a boy, Jakob (Edward Georg Dring), who hasn’t spoken since his mother died some seven months earlier.
So she moves in with the family at their eerie centuries-old castle. What the father didn’t tell her was that Jakob believes his mother speaks to him through the stone in the estate’s walls.
“I thought it had a Hitchcock-esque, ‘Rebecca’ quality to it that simmered,” Clarke says.
The longer she stays at the estate, the more Verena falls under its spell and the influence of Klaus, for whom she poses while he does sketches and sculptures of her.
The actress says she sees Verena as missing pieces in her life. “So she was waiting to be swept up by something, which makes her susceptible.”
Even though she shot “Voice From the Stone” a while back, Clarke says as soon as she starts talking about the film, “memory starts flooding back. Shooting it was a very visceral experience.”
The actress says she tries to squeeze in films between “Game of Thrones” seasons. “I never like to do the same thing for too long.”
Last year, Clarke was seen in the romantic dramedy “Me Before You” and shot “Above Suspicion” for director Phillip Noyce (“Patriot Games”). The latter is based on a true story about an FBI agent (Jack Huston) sent to Kentucky who becomes involved with one of his informants (Clarke).
Before the shoot, the actress had worried about doing a Kentucky accent for the role. Recently, Clarke says she got to see a screening of the film, which she call “a doozy,” for the first time. So how was her accent? “I thought it was OK,” she says a bit critically while slipping into Kentucky drawl, “but I really enjoyed doing it.”
“Breaking up ‘Game of Thrones’ with these kinds of movies makes me happy,” Clarke adds. “If you go off and do something that’s really fulfilling, something that pushes you by asking the more fundamental questions about character and being human, it only enriches your performances when you then go back and do the bigger stuff like ‘Game of Thrones.’ “
In the seventh season of”Game of Thrones,” Clarke’s character, Daenerys, the Mother of Dragons, is expected to gather her army and begin to make a play for the Iron Throne, the ultimate prize that the various factions are fighting for in the series.
Since the storyline of the HBO series, an international phenomenon, has gone past the George R.R. Martin books it’s based on, everyone is wondering what will happen during its last two seasons.
And while Clarke may have already shot Season 7, she says even she doesn’t know what will happen in the final year.
“No one knows anything. No one is told anything. It’s all crazy,” the actress says. “It’s a secret from the cast. We generally can’t be trusted. They pretty much have told us so.”
In another secretive project, Clarke is filming the “Untitled Han Solo Project” in London. Alden Ehrenreich plays the young version of the “Star Wars” character, but the actress can’t even say what her character is.
When that’s completed filming, the 30-year-old Clarke, who finished second in popularity on the IMDb website last year based on page views, will return to filming “Game of Thrones.”
“I actually need a holiday,” she says, sighing. She though, after “Thrones” — “Five Times in One Night” in London’s West End.
“I’m really excited about trodding the boards, which is kind of the antithesis of doing big things. Following that, I just want to do really interesting characters,” she says, adding that she feels fortunate to be able to make those choices.
Eventually her goal would be to produce.
“As I said, I read a lot, and I tend to read with an eye toward would this be interesting to watch?”
Clarke points to Reese Witherspoon as a model. “She’s now an actress that is a producer and a legitimate presence in creating roles for women. I’d like to do something like that.”
Before she goes, though,there’s still just enough time to try to get Clarke to say something about the Han Solo film.
“I genuinely can’t tell you anything other than Alden is magnificent, and it’s a delight to do something on that level with really cool actors and nice people. But it’s even scarier talking about that than ‘Game of Thrones.’ “