EMILIA CLAR KE
How the mother of dragons is spreading her wings.
A leafy mews in Harrow on the Hill is drawing a crowd. Residents in doorways, kids on scooters and barking dogs are all staring at the commotion at the end of a quaint row of terraced cottages. There, Emilia Clarke is in fits of giggles, as she tries to squeeze into the passenger seat of a car. Dressed in bright yellow and green, the Game Of Thrones star is having a slight problem manoeuvring her “buns of steel”, as she puts it, into position.
After mothering dragons and mastering terminators, you might think the 29-year-old Brit could manage a parked car. But then Clarke might just be deep in character right now. Her latest role comes in Me Before You, an adaptation of Jojo Moyes’ bestseller (5m copies in 32 languages) and something of a huge departure for Clarke. A romantic drama with an underlying edge, it’s far removed from the fantasy that’s made her famous. Never mind that last year, Clarke was voted
Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive, you’ve never quite seen her quite like this. When she finishes the take, she ambles over to join Total Film for a chat, perching those “buns of steel” on a garden wall. She looks buttercup-bright: yellow raincoat, green heels and tights, a light-olive jumper and a butterfly clip in her hair. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” she says, gesturing to her garish outfit. “It’s a huge part of Lou, a huge part.”
‘Lou’ is Louisa Clark, the skittish workingclass heroine of Moyes’ novel. “The closest parallel I can have is Bridget Jones, in essence,” Clarke explains of her namesake. “Doesn’t quite think much of herself, doesn’t think before she speaks, doesn’t think before she acts, tends to fall and knock things over… She just has
a huge presence and a huge amount of energy and a lot of crazy thoughts running around her rather bonkers mind.”
Clarke was first sent the script while on the set of last year’s Terminator Genisys, the $440m-grossing fifth film in the sci-borg series that saw her play the young(ish) Sarah Connor. “I read it and it just… literally from the first chapter, I was like, ‘This is me! Oh my God, I’ve got to do it!’ Genuinely, never in my life, have I wanted a part more than this.” Turns out, Clarke is much closer to Lou than her other roles. “Of the strong women I play,” she reveals, “I’m winging it!”
Certainly, she has her clumsy side: when
TF catches up with her a few weeks later, she’s on crutches due to a fractured hip. “I was running and I fell over – idiot!” she cries. “In true Lou fashion, though!” But it’s more than that: strip away the flaxen locks she sports as GOT’s inimitable Daenerys Targaryen or the leathers worn by Sarah Connor and the real Clarke shines through: the fair-skinned, green-eyed girl-next-door.
It’s why she’s ideal casting on Me Before You, a film that promises to deliver an adult romantic dramedy the likes of which haven’t been made since Terms Of Endearment back in the ’80s. “[ At the moment], you’ve kind of got the weepy dramas and then you’ve got the romcoms,” says Clarke, “but this falls in a whole new territory. Its equal parts comedy, equal parts drama – in the truest sense – and equal parts romance.”
The drama comes from Lou’s relationship with Will Traynor (Sam Claflin), an athletic young banker cut off in his prime after a motorbike accident leaves him paralysed and in a wheelchair. After losing her job working in a tea shop, Lou finds a new position as Traynor’s carer. “She walks in all smiles and sunshine and meets this incredibly depressed, intelligent, wonderful man – they don’t like each other at first,” says Clarke, before pausing. “That’s an understatement!”
Addressing life-and-death issues (quite literally), Me Before You is more than the usual will-they-won’t-they-romance, with Will determined to end his life at Dignitas, the real-life Swiss organisation set up to aid those with terminal illnesses. Calling herself a “pretty liberal individual”, Clarke nevertheless has to reset her brain on the subject of assisted suicide. “I myself have personally gone through an entire journey coming to terms with people who choose to go to Dignitas and their reasons for it… Working on this movie has shone a completely different light on it.”
Will the film deliver? Certainly anticipation is swelling after the trailer dropped in February, sending the novel shooting back up the bestseller charts. After the disappointment of the Anne Hathaway-starring One Day, this might be one of the few populist book-to-screen adaptations that gets it right (encouragingly, author Moyes has also written the screenplay and acclaimed theatre director Thea Sharrock, making her feature debut, is behind the camera).
Back on the set, Clarke joins Janet McTeer, who plays Will’s mother, to complete the day’s scene, which rather sums up the film’s emotional tightrope-walk. The tone shifts from the earlier jollity as Lou tells Will’s mother, “I’m basically just here on suicide watch”, in a heated exchange back in that car. Seven attempts later – “lots of lovely, lovely takes,” trills Clarke – the scene is in the can. Following McTeer’s last moments on the set, the whole crew clap and Clarke hugs her.
It’s almost impossible to take your eyes off the infectious Clarke in these moments. “I’m a classic girl,” she says. “I came out of my mum’s stomach going ‘I want to be an actor!’” Well, almost. When she was three years old, her mother took her to see a production of Show
Boat that her father, a theatre sound engineer, was working on. “My dad is one of the reasons why I saw that this could be something I could do,” she says. “He would bring a dose of realism to my big hopes and dreams and aspirations, which was all done with such love.”
She speaks fondly of her old man, who once told her to never trust anyone with a television bigger than their bookshelf. “That’s a genuine quote. I won’t tell you some others because you’ll realise my political alignment and maybe that’s too much, but, yeah… My dad has brought me up like that.” Does that mean she doesn’t really watch TV? “I’ll watch a bit of junk every now and again – love the [Great British] Bake Off! That kind of nonsense. But, yeah, I read. I’ve got a lot of books.”
There’s a down-to-earth, almost tomboy, quality to Clarke too, though. Drinking in the pub with her mates is her perfect afternoon, especially if it involves watching rugby union. “That’s the sport I would watch. My dad and my brother love it. They’re either watching football or rugby. Football – I can take or leave it. But rugby, at least you get to see some aggression on the pitch!” Did she play at school? “Goodness me, no. I wouldn’t last a second.”
“I’m a classic girl. I came out of my mum’s stomach going ‘I want to be an actor!’”
Raised in Berkshire and schooled in Oxford, Clarke credits her family for instilling a strong work ethic in her. “I work hard and that’s what I was taught to do,” she says. (Ambition is prevalent; her mother went from secretarial college to launching her own startup company). When she was 18, Clarke enrolled in London’s Drama Centre; even before she graduated, she’d won a one-off part in TV show Doctors followed by a television movie, Triassic Attack.
It all changed when she landed GOT, replacing Tamzin Merchant, who had shot the pilot episode. The success of the show took her by enormous surprise. “Game Of
Thrones really launched so many of us, and for me, I’ve been so lucky – because I’ve had my own time to digest it,” she says. This past season, she says, is the first year she’s really come to terms with the show’s phenomenal global success. “I spent a lot of time going, ‘What? No! How? But! Hmm!’”
In between seasons, Clarke has played it low-key. She was the love interest in Spike
Island, the affectionate 2012 Brit-flick set around The Stone Roses’ iconic 1990 gig. A year later she was playing daughter to Jude Law’s profane criminal in Dom Hemingway, while making her first steps on Broadway as socialite Holly Golightly – the role made famous by Audrey Hepburn – in a production of Breakfast At Tiffany’s. “I’d love to go back and do the West End,” she muses.
Before any of this, Clarke returns for the sixth season of GOT – after the mother of all cliffhangers, which saw Kit Harington’s Jon Snow slain Julius Caesar-style by his Night’s Watch brethren. “I read every single script we’ve ever made, and I’ve never truly cried whilst reading one. But that, I couldn’t keep it together,” says Clarke. “I just started bawling. I called the boys [ showrunners David Benioff and
D.B. Weiss], and said, ‘Are you fucking kidding?’ They were like, ‘No, we’re not!’”
Clarke took Harrington out for drinks after she read that season five finale script (“I was like, ‘Dude, what the…?’”), and they regularly hang out off-set. Unlike Clarke, who doesn’t get recognised much due to her own brunette locks, Harington can’t escape the attention. “I take pictures of Kit with other people all the time. We’re walking down the street and people are like, ‘Jon Snow!’ They’re like, ‘Can you take it?’ And I’m like, ‘Course I can, darling!’”
No wonder adjusting to fame has been easy. She recalls another night out at a gig with Harington and their co-star Alfie Allen (who just so happens to be the son of Me Before You’s producer Alison Owen) “Those boys get picked on! It’s ridiculous! I went to the loo – I was in this cubicle, and there were two girls either side of me, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, Jon Snow’s outside! Who the fuck is that girl he’s with? We don’t know!’ And I’m like, ‘Hee-hee-hee!’ So I can’t imagine how difficult it is for them.” Later in the year, Clarke will be seen in Voices
From The Stone, an Italian-set mystery co-starring Marton Csokas that she compares, in essence, to both Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. Dubbing the script “haunting” and “beautiful”, it sounds like a real passion project. “I fell in love with it five years ago. It was one of those quiet scripts where we said, ‘Whenever there’s a moment’, and then we decided, ‘There are no moments, let’s just do it!’”
While she’s also circling Set It Up, an MGM romcom about two put-upon assistants who match-make their bosses, Clarke isn’t about to box herself in. “I would like to do as much varied work as possible,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Right, let’s try a bit of everything. Literally!’ If diversity is what she craves, maybe she won’t be so bummed that Paramount recently dropped the idea of two Terminator sequels. “I’m pushing myself as an actor,” she nods, “without getting comfortable.”