Emilia Clarke definitely wants to expand beyond the fantasy genre and dragons.
The actress, best known for portraying Daenerys Targaryen, aka the Mother of Dragons, on HBO’s Game of Thrones, recently told The New York Times that she would prefer to never be seen with the fictional creature again.
“You’re highly unlikely to see me get on a dragon, or even in the same frame as a dragon, ever again,” she asserted.
The HBO show took up nearly a decade of Clarke’s life, running for eight seasons, from 2011 to 2019. The role also earned the actress four Emmy nominations for her portrayal of Daenerys.
While Clarke is now excited to be starring in Peacock’s espionage show Ponies, she admitted that signing on for another TV show after Game of Thrones was still daunting. Especially since she’s been focusing on film roles for the last few years.
“I was definitely, like… a lead in a TV show? I know what that commitment feels like,” she told the Times.
But Clarke eventually was able to go into Ponies with a different mindset, after getting some much-needed clarity on the direction she wanted to take her career post-Thrones during her time off during the pandemic.
“It forced me to answer some questions I probably could have put off answering for another 10 years,” Clarke said, adding that it took her quite a while after the HBO show ended in 2019 “to realize that I could try and get some autonomy over my choices, my work. So much of my career didn’t reflect my taste, I just sort of shot out of a cannon.”
While Clarke previously said she was annoyed at first by the ending of Thrones and Daenerys suddenly turning into one of the primary villains, she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021 that she finally found peace over her character’s conclusion.
“I really, really, really have. I think it’ll take me to my 90s to be able to objectively see what Game of Thrones was, because there’s just too much me in it. I have too many emotional reactions for what Emilia, herself, was experiencing at that moment in time when we were filming it,” she said of the finale, adding, “Daenerys has a part of my heart. She is in there, and I’ll never forget.”
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