NAKED TRUTH
‘THRONES’ BIGS DEMANDED I DO NUDE SCENES
Emilia Clarke says her ample nude scenes in season one of “Game of Thrones” were a baptism by fire.
In a starkly candid appearance on Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast, the actress said she was “fresh” out of drama school when she landed her Mother of Dragons role — along with the unexpected motherlode of on-set nudity.
“Obviously I took the job and then they sent me the scripts, and I was reading them, and it was like, ‘Ooohhh, there’s the catch,’ ” said the star who played Daenerys Targaryen in eight seasons of the HBO saga.
“It was definitely hard,” she said, adding she had “no idea” what she was doing because she’d never been on a set like that before.
“Now things are very, very, very different. And I’m a lot more savvy about what I’m comfortable with, and what I am okay with doing,” she told Shepard and his podcast cohost Monica Padman.
“I’ve had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up.’ And they’re like, ‘You don’t wanna disappoint your ‘Game of Thrones’ fans.’ And I’m like, ‘F—k you,’ ” Clarke said without clarifying on which project that exchange took place.
Despite that, Clarke, 33, said she’s grateful she was “protected” on “Thrones” because the storytelling was “at a very high level” during a time when she was too inexperienced to raise objections.
“Regardless of whether there had been nudity or not, I would have spent that first season thinking I’m not worthy of requiring anything,” she said, calling her state of mind as “imposter syndrome times a million.”
“I’m gonna go cry in the bathroom, and then I’m gonna come back, and we’re going to do the scene, and it’s going to be completely fine,” she said of her mindset then.
The actress (inset) heaped praise on her season-one co-star Jason Momoa, saying he was “so kind and considerate” and took care of her “in an environment where I didn’t know I needed to be taken care of.”
She said Momoa helped her through a particularly horrific scene in which his character Khal Drogo raped her character.
“He was crying more than I was. It’s only now that I realize how fortunate I was with that. Because that could have gone many, many, many different ways,” she said.
“He was always like, ‘Can we get her a f——-g robe? Can we get her a goddamned robe? She’s shivering,’ ” Clarke remembered.
She said her later love scenes with co-star Kit Harington were a completely different story. She had several seasons under her belt by then, and Harington is one of her best friends.
“It was like, ‘Bro, we are better actors than this.’ The crew were like, ‘It’s not funny guys. It’s not funny.’ And we’re like, ‘It’s hilarious,’ ” she recalled laughing.
The actress who appears in the comedy “Last Christmas” said she learned the lesson early on not to worry about what others had to say about her online.
“The reason I don’t Google myself … was because when I did after season one, I just saw articles about like how fat my a— was,” she said. “Cut me some goddamned slack.”
The Brit, who Time magazine named one of the most influential people of 2019 said she’s much more seasoned now, especially when it comes to knowing exactly how important —or not — nudity is to a story.
She doesn’t regret the early nudity with Daenerys’ character because it added a level of vulnerability that made people connect with and care about the abuse she endured, Clarke said.