‘Thrones’ star reveals brain woes

Emilia Clarke rides dragons, burns her enemies alive and ate a horse’s heart on “Game of Thrones” — but the battles she faced off-screen were far more frightening.

The actress, who stars as Daenerys Targaryen on the hit HBO fantasy show, has revealed she suffered two aneurysms in between filming, resulting in unbearable pain and several operations.

Clarke, 32, in a personal essay published by The New Yorker on Thursday, wrote that it was February of 2011 and she had just finished filming the first season of the series based on George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels when she got a bad headache while getting dressed to work out at a North London gym.

At the hospital, Clarke (photo) was given an MRI that revealed she had a life-threatening type of stroke called a subarachnoid hemorrhage, caused by bleeding in the area surrounding the brain.

“I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture,” Clarke wrote. “As I later learned, about a third of SAH patients die immediately or soon thereafter.”

She had a three-hour brain surgery at age 24. “When I woke, the pain was unbearable. I had no idea where I was. My field of vision was constricted. There was a tube down my throat and I was parched and nauseated.”

In 2013, after wrapping up season three, she had a brain scan in New York as a regular followup. A growth on the other side of her brain had doubled in size and she went in for surgery in Manhattan. When she woke, she screamed in pain after the failed operation. They told her they needed to go in through her skull this time, and she woke up from that surgery in even more pain.

It took a while for Clarke to heal, but she says she’s 100% now. “Game of Thrones” returns for its final season April 14.