‘Game’ on!
Dragon queen’s a fighting machine
Emilia Clarke is red-hot right now.
And not just because she could feel the pyrotechnics radiating on her skin while filming “Terminator Genisys.”
Her starring role in the latest installment of the sci-fi franchise opening Wednesday shows how far the British actress has come since breaking through on “Game of Thrones.”
“There’s one scene where I’m firing a grenade launcher into a fireball and then running... that was frighteningly real to film,” Clarke, 28, tells the Daily News. “That was one of those ones where I’m like, ‘I’m insured right? Okay, good.’”
Taking over the iconic role of Sarah Connor — made famous by Linda Hamilton in the first two movies — Clarke can’t reload a shotgun onehanded like her muscular predecessor, but she logged enough weeks on firearm training to become a pretty competent on-screen warrior.
To her, holding a gun is as scary as handling a dragon, as her “Thrones” character Daenerys does.
“You start to question yourself when you have a weapon that could genuinely kill someone in your hands and someone tells you, ‘Wow, you’re a really good shot,’” Clarke says. “Wow, I just freaked myself out there... but it’s all to tell a story.”
The Mother of Dragons was even more freaked out when she first found out the grisly fate of her friend Kit Harington’s character, Jon Snow, in the season finale of “Game of Thrones” that aired two weeks ago.
She wept when she read the script. “We’ve had a lot of horrific deaths that I’ve read through ... before I’ve seen the show,” says Clarke. “And this was one in particular. I’ve never gotten crazy emotional reading them, but then that finale was the one that had me genuinely in tears when I read it. I called Kit and then called (showrunners) David (Benioff) and Dan (Weiss) and being like, ‘Are you f----ng kidding me?’”
A few months later, she had to watch the horrible scene unfold on TV as the hero was stabbed to death by the Night’s Watch, the brotherhood he led.
Clarke admits she cried all over again.
Major characters are killed off often on the HBO series, so Clarke wonders if her Daenerys Targaryen, beloved by fans, is immune. She prays every time she cracks open a new script.
“But in that same breath,” says Clarke, “I do feel like because I’m one of those characters who has been on the show for a while, I might be one of those actors who would get a phone call first.
“And that hasn’t happened — yet. But you can’t be afraid to answer your phone, either.”
Good thing, or she might have missed the call for “Terminator Genisys.”
The reboot opens in the year 2029, with the resistance led by John Connor (Jason Clarke) having virtually defeated the robotic forces that had wiped out most of the planet’s human population. As fans of the franchise have seen before, Connor sends his loyal right hand, Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back to 1984 to protect his mother, Sarah, from Skynet’s attempt to kill her and crush its archnemesis before he’s even born. But through complications caused by all that time traveling and a lot of exposition, Reese arrives to a find a very different situation than both he and movie-goers expect.
This Sarah Connor happened to be raised from childhood by a Terminator (with Arnold Schwarzenegger reprising his signature role for a fourth time), sent back in time earlier to save her from another attempt to end the Connor lineage prematurely.
The concept provides the perfect explanation for why a virtually indestructible robot ages like an actor in his mid-60s. The joke is not lost on Schwarzenegger; “I’m old, not obsolete,” is a recurring line in the film.
In real life, the former California governor hasn’t lost any of his physical presence, says Clarke. She describes the first