The morning after the 2019 Emmy Awards, Emilia Clarke woke up determined to rewrite her own definition of success. Hours earlier, she had lost the lead actress drama prize to Jodie Comer of Killing Eve, capping off what she now describes as a chastening night at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.

Emilia Clarke opens up about Game of Thrones, pay myths, brain hemorrhages and her Ponies future

Rethinking success after the Iron Throne
Speaking to Variety at London’s Hotel Café Royal, Clarke admitted the loss stung more than it should have. “I’m embarrassed to admit that not winning an Emmy was a really significant thing,” she told the publication, recalling how she had convinced herself the Game of Thrones era was already old news. She skipped the after-parties, went home, and resolved to stop chasing what she jokingly called a 13-year-old’s yardstick of achievement.

That reset meant turning down work, then eventually saying yes purely for the joy of it. Her upcoming Drake Doremus indie Next Life, a ‘Sliding Doors’-style romance premiering at the Tribeca Festival, was the first project she signed on to under that new philosophy. She and Doremus even got matching ivy tattoos to mark it.

Setting the salary record straight
Clarke also pushed back on long-circulating reports that the core ‘Game of Thrones’ cast earned $300,000 per episode, calling the figure wildly inflated. “We didn’t earn that much. Can you imagine? I’d have been driving a couple of Porsches!” she said. The HBO show, she acknowledged, did give her enough financial security to pay off her parents’ mortgage, even if global fame frightened her in equal measure.

Daenerys, the showrunners and that ending
Clarke admitted she was “absolutely livid” about the manner of Daenerys’ demise in the widely criticized series finale. Yet she never had creative input on the show “nor did I want any,” she said, calling David Benioff and D.B. Weiss “geniuses” while dismissing her younger self as “not qualified.” The showrunners, she revealed, were “fastidious about us saying the lines exactly as they’ve written them” to the point that if she said “it’s” instead of “it is,” they’d ask her to go again. So while she brought Daenerys to life over eight years, she never felt she had a hand in developing her. “I was given the seasons, and I, to the best of my ability, empathized and understood and tracked every choice she made so it felt like mine,” she said. “I felt like that was what my job was.”

Survivor’s guilt and what comes next
The actress, who suffered two brain hemorrhages during the show’s run and lost her father to cancer after Season 7, said she spent years feeling she had cheated death. She launched the SameYou brain injury charity in 2019 to support fellow survivors.

Now starring in Peacock’s Ponies as Bea, a CIA agent’s wife probing his death in Soviet-era Russia, Clarke is also producing the series and awaiting a Season 2 greenlight. Her armed-robber turn in Prime Video’s Criminal, in which she gleefully describes her character as “all tits and gold chains,” rounds out a slate she said finally feels like hers.

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Tags : Criminal, Daenerys Targaryen, David Benioff, DB Weiss, Drake Doremus, Emilia Clarke, Features, Game Of Thrones, HBO, Hollywood, International, Jodie Comer, Killing Eve, Next Life, Peacock, Ponies, SameYou, Tribeca Festival