Clarke back on television in ‘Secret Invasion’
Actor helped make Skrull warrior full, strong character
Emilia Clarke is no stranger to projects that attract passionate fans prone to fervent discussions of even the most minute details.
The actor’s portrayal of Daenerys Targaryen, the exiled princess turned fierce Mother of Dragons on HBO’s hit epic fantasy “Game of Thrones,” has been seared into our collective conscious. Over the course of its eight-season run, audiences dissected, debated and speculated about the Emmy-winning series’ storylines, characters, continuity, lighting, bloopers and more.
Her big-screen roles such as Qi’ra, Han’s enigmatic and deadly ex-friend in “Solo: A Star Wars Story” (2018), as well as an alternate timeline Sarah Connor in “Terminator Genisys” (2015), brought her into two of the most beloved franchises.
Now, as part of Marvel’s “Secret Invasion,” Clarke has joined one of the biggest cinematic universes, and it marks her first television role since wrapping production of “Game of Thrones” in 2018. Developed for television by Kyle Bradstreet, the extraterrestrial political spy thriller is in the midst of its six-episode run on Disney+.
Clarke is plenty animated while discussing the series during a recent interview, but her exuberance as she details her love of theater and how it’s an actor’s medium is when she most resembles the Marvel die-hards explaining the supremacy of certain MCU installments and characters over others.
“Yeah I get nerdy excited about it,” says Clarke as she expounds on the magic that happens both on and behind the stage. “I’m a theater kid. I’m a theater nerd.”
She describes it as her “happy place,” after having grown up around the stage. Her father, Peter Clarke, was a sound designer for theaters, and she traces her love of the magic of storytelling and acting all the way back to those childhood memories with him. In 2022, she made her West End debut in Jamie Lloyd’s production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” which was initially postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
So it’s no surprise — aside from the chance to tackle something more “grounded” and “gritty” within the Marvel sandbox — Clarke cites the opportunity to work alongside her “Secret Invasion” castmates as one of the project’s main appeals. They are acting powerhouses, with innumerable credits both on screen and on the stage.
“The cast is ridiculous,” says Clarke. “Olivia Colman, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Don Cheadle. I was like ‘Where do I sign?’ ”
“Secret Invasion” involves a conspiracy by a faction of the Skrull — alien refugees that have been stranded on Earth since the events of the 2019 film “Captain Marvel” — to supplant humans and take over the planet. After patiently waiting for 30 years for Nick Fury (Jackson) to make good on his promise to find the Skrull a new home, the shapeshifting aliens are ready to forcefully take matters into their own hands.
Unlike standard mainstream superhero fare that features a villain with clearly malevolent intentions, the show “asks the audience to make up their own minds,” says Clarke. “It’s presenting the audience with a moral quandary and a very timely question ... about refugees and about whether violence and war has an understandable reason for being or whether it doesn’t.”
In “Secret Invasion,” Clarke plays G’iah, Talos’ (Mendelsohn) estranged daughter who was introduced in “Captain Marvel” as a child. She was raised on Earth in a household that believes in coexistence and peace with humans. But after becoming disillusioned with Fury and her father’s failure to secure the Skrull a new home, G’iah rebels.
“Her rebellion was much bigger than most teenagers’ rebellions,” says executive producer and director Ali Selim.
Drawn to Gravik’s (Kingsley Ben-Adir) “more aggressive, direct, honest path to finding (the Skrull) a home,” G’iah chooses to join her father’s archenemy, and she buys into “Gravik’s sense that his grievance can only be settled through violence.”
It’s only after learning that her mother was killed that she starts to question her allegiance.
“That causes her to return to her father’s side and, in the beginning, tentatively help him,” says Selim, who adds that part of G’iah’s journey is not just about figuring out her place as a warrior, but finding her way as one who is also ethical.
As much as Clarke, who notched four Emmy nominations for her portrayal of Daenerys, downplays her acting skills compared with “the enormity of the amount of talent on this show,” it’s clear that her colleagues hold her in the highest regard.
Mendelsohn, a self-described “Game of Thrones” fanatic who has watched the series “cover to cover” four times, says some of his greatest days on “Secret Invasion” were when he was working alongside Clarke.
“I think Emilia and I can see in each other enough to be able to relax and just not know together,” says Mendelsohn on exploring their on-screen dynamic. “We just kind of let ourselves venture into a bit of a magic zone. It felt like there was an intimacy that was just allowed to be and that was very good.”
After struggling to really find G’iah on the page, Clarke and Selim collaborated on making the young Skrull warrior a fuller, stronger character.
“I think we really pulled out ‘the girl’ and made her into the hero,” says Selim. “I don’t know that I could have done that with any other actor.”
Clarke was just thrilled by everything she was “given to play with” G’iah, in exploring the characters’ relationships and journey. G’iah starts off on the opposite side of the Skrull uprising from her father, but it’s hinted that allegiances will shift over the course of the series.
The actor admitted she has sought solace in film and theater after her long tenure on “Game of Thrones,” a series that had a massive following and was her breakout role. Clarke teases that she has many more unannounced TV projects on the way.
For now, she is slated to star in two films, the biopic “McCarthy” as Jean Kerr, the wife of Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and in “An Ideal Wife” as Constance Lloyd, the Irish author and activist who was married to poet and playwright Oscar Wilde.
“I needed different characters,” says Clarke. “I needed different experiences. I just want to try and do as many different things as possible.”