THRONE FOR A LOOP
Shocking ‘GoT’ script left Emilia Clarke in tears
BELFAST — In the cold, cavernous building that once housed the growing skeleton of the HMS Titanic, the Mother of Dragons shivers as prickly goosebumps erupt across exposed parts of her pale body.
Still, Emilia Clarke — who exploded into a global star on “Game of Thrones,” playing Daenerys Targaryen — smiles as she’s handed a warm cup of tea. She cradles the steaming beverage in her hands and blows on its surface.
“It’s chilly,” says Clarke, 28, flipping some of the fake, elaborately braided white tresses so expertly attached that there’s no hint of her real raven-colored hair.
“I’m so lucky to have this wig,” Clarke says, fingering the long, platinum-blond wig hanging around her shoulders.
“Every morning it takes two hours to get this onto my head and for me to get into her (Daenerys’) head. So there’s something really effective about visually looking so different here than I do in my own life.”
As the fifth season of “Thrones” begins, Daenerys still commands an army of elite eunuch warriors and thousands of freed slaves, but her relationship with three growing dragons has become “complicated,” she says.
All her forces are based in the desert city of Meereen, where she rules from atop a massive pyramid and struggles to quell a growing rebellion.
In reality, this is not Meereen. It’s Belfast and it’s cold.
“Usually it gets very hot because we use lights to emulate a tropical country, but not today because we’re doing a miserable scene,” she says. “It makes me slightly sedate.” The building is called the Paint Hall, a named coined more than a century ago when it was part of the yard where massive ocean liners like the Titanic were built and painted.
Now it’s one of the largest indoor studios in Europe and houses other major “GoT” set pieces, including a towering special-effects green screen, an icy battle field and the Iron Throne at the heart of the series that so many covet .
Yet even as the ultimate “GoT” insider, Clarke doesn’t know where this is all going.
“All of us will get the latest scripts and start calling each other, “Oh my God! Can you f—ing believe it!” she says. “I will say that this season is, like, full of shocks. One shock that had me in tears reading the script, but I can’t tell you what it was because I would have to kill you, lest I be killed.”
She giggles, and it’s an unsettling image. Sitting in her full Daenerys regalia, Clarke is usually a character wrestling with far too many weighty issues to even crack a smile.
“I’m always expecting a little sniper rifle peeking around the corner,” she jokes.
Clarke credits “GoT” with providing her with a practical education. “I’ve grown up on this show,” Clarke
says. “My filmic education has been from this and I’m spoiled because of it.”
An assistant whispers something in her ear and Clarke frowns. She’s about to film what she calls “a rather depressing scene,” and a few minutes later she flubs her lines.
“This is so rare,” whispers a producer. “It’s got to be because her mom is here today. This never happens; it’s the only explanation.”
Indeed, her mother stands nearby, unconcerned with her daughter’s mistake.
In fact, Jenny Clarke is beaming as she watches her daughter act.
“Isn’t she good?” the older Clarke says. “I can’t ever get enough.”
She says Emilia Clarke’s love of the spotlight goes back to when she was just 3 years old.
“She was always talking, she always wanted to act,” says mama Clarke, a businesswoman who worked so much when her daughter was young that she laments how she didn’t have time to sew together stage costumes like the other kindergarten mothers. “So I bought one,” she says plainly.
Emilia laughs wickedly when told about her mom’s take on the star’s first time on stage. “What I remember is forgetting all my lines and standing there looking at the audience thinking, ‘Cool!’ I don’t know quite what to do next, and the teacher is mouthing the words and I’m like, um-hum. I’ve never had that much confidence since, that’s for sure,” she says, giggling. “Ignorance is bliss.”
Now, as a star in one of the biggest, most expensive and elaborate shows on television, Clarke gets to share the screen with dragons.
In many scenes with the mythical beasts, she and the creatures look breathtaking on the screen. But it’s a lot less glamorous in person. Long before the special effects are added in, the dragon’s fearsome head is represented on the set by a big green ball on the end of a stick.
“I’ve named the green ball Wilson, like Tom Hanks did in ‘Cast Away,’” Clarke snickers. “The wonderful thing is that the dragons have always been this unknown entity, this unknown space. You don’t see them until the show comes on,” she says. “But because I’ve lived with them for five years, the imagined space I use when I’m with them is invested with so much love and so much genuine thought and emotion.
“In that sense it’s not that hard to work with them at all because I’ve already got all of that in my head. I think you need to have a lot of guts to stand up in front of a whole crew and feel, honestly and truly feel, something toward this big green ball on a pole with a dude at the end of it. You just zone out and invest in it.”
With her armies, her dragons and her sheer moxie, Daenerys is among the strongest women on television. But Clarke claims it really is all an act and almost wishes she had such a strong backbone in real life.
“It’s very funny,” she says. “I don’t know what on Earth they (casting producers) saw in me. By nature I’m not at as confident or as strong as she is, and while I definitely would like to think of myself as a strong person, she’s stronger than me in many ways,” says Clarke. “But given the opportunity recently, I’ve discovered that there’s more of Dany in me than I thought.”
“Dany and I have reflected each other over the years,” says Clarke. “She’s had such growth, such an amazing tale about becoming a woman, and I as a person have had a wonderful arc growing as an actor throughout this whole experience. It’s helped me find my feet in an industry I didn’t know at all.”
She describes Daenerys as “feisty as hell” in season five. “And it’s wonderful to get that out,” Clarke says. “She tests every boundary, but the result of her doing that is that now she is capable of seeing what is possible, so she behaves on a much more realistic level than you’ve ever seen before, because she’s strong and brave enough to make the decisions she needs to make to be a warrior.”
I think you need to have a lot of guts to stand up in front of a whole crew and feel, honestly and truly feel, something toward this big green ball on a pole with a dude at the end of it. You just zone out and invest in it.