Game of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke has discussed having no control over her character Daenerys Targaryen’s storyline, dialogue or eventual fate — including in the series’ polarizing finale.
Speaking to Variety, Clarke said she “didn’t have any creative input” on her role, though hadn’t sought out any either, believing she was “not qualified.” Still, she noted that the series’ showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had been “fastidious” that actors stuck to their scripts, with retakes necessary for even small differences — such as if she said “it’s” instead of “it is.”
“Aside from what I brought as an actor, I didn’t have any creative input, nor did I want any,” Clarke said, answering again with a flat “no” when asked if she could have altered Daenerys’ ultimate fate — an ending that many fans disliked.
Game of Thrones’ final episodes see her character suddenly turn from a hero — who has just defeated an undead army and looks set to save the Seven Kingdoms from Lannister rule — to a city-burning conqueror. In a tragic twist, she is ultimately stopped by her lover Jon Snow. Her lifeless body is then carried away by her dragon — and that’s that.
[Benioff and Weiss] were “fastidious about us saying the lines exactly as they’ve written them,” Clarke continued. “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. I felt like that was what my job was.”
Clarke’s former Game of Thrones co-star Kit Harington previously said that mistakes were made in the show’s controversial ending, but he was “not sure there was any alternative” as the series’ cast and crew were exhausted following almost a decade of production. “I think if there was any fault with the end of Thrones, is that we were all so f***ing tired, we couldn’t have gone on longer.”
Ultimately, Clarke said that she was now “grateful” for the experience of playing Daenerys, which catapulted her to stardom and has since landed her roles in numerous other TV series and movies.
“I have gone through every circuitous route to get to the place that I am now, which is finally being able to be very grateful for everything that Game of Thrones did and has given me,” Clarke concluded. “I no longer feel trapped in it, or trapped in the result of being in it. I feel just really lucky that it happened to me — even luckier that I’ve had time to understand what that was, and now I feel firmly on the other side.”
In January, Clarke admitted feeling “really pissed” at the expert who developed Game of Thrones’ fictional languages, after reading that he thought her Dothraki pronounciation “sucked.” David J. Peterson, who HBO hired as a full-time linguist on its hit fantasy show, subsequently responded to Clarke’s comments, saying that the actress had misunderstood what he meant, and that she “never had to be good at it,” as his intention had never been that Daenerys Targaryen would speak Dothraki flawlessly.
The same month, Clarke said she was likely finished working on fantasy projects after spending nine years as Daenerys, telling the New York Times it was “highly unlikely” viewers would see her “get on a dragon, or even in the same frame as a dragon, ever again.”
Image credit: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
