Emilia Clarke suffered from a very serious brain aneurysm in 2011. She is now sharing photographs that were taken shortly after that time that she had never shared publicly.
The actor, known for her part in the Game of Thrones was in a hospital bed looking rather frail. It shows just how serious that condition was that affected the 24-year-old.
Emilia, who is now 32, shared the pictures and started talking openly about the issue. She gave an interview in which she talked about her struggles after she recovered.
When she looks back on it now. she says: “The first time it was difficult, with the second one I found it much harder to stay optimistic.
“[I coped with it as a] a day to day thing. I definitely went through a period of being… down – putting it mildly.”
She suffered her second aneurysm 2 years later, in 2013. This one almost proved to be fatal.
“The second one, there was a bit of my brain that actually died,” she revealed. “If a part of your brain doesn’t get blood to it for a minute, it will just no longer work. It’s like you short circuit. So, I had that.
“So, they [the doctors] literally were looking at the brain and being like, ‘Well, we think it could be – could be her concentration, it could be her peripheral vision’.”
Emilia joked: “I always say it’s my taste in men. For a very long time, I thought it was my ability to act…that was a deep paranoia.”
Thankfully, she was able to recover to the point where she was back on the GOT and has been a constant feature of the show.
She had even said that the pressure of playing such a difficult character had an impact on her ability to heal. Quite simply, she had ‘no time to question her mortality’.
“You go on the set,” she says, “and you play a badass character, and you walk through fire, and you speak to hundreds of people, and you’re being asked to be – to work as hard as you possibly can.
“And that became the thing that just saved me from considering my own mortality, yeah.”
You can see Emilia on the final season of GOT when it starts on April 15.
