Emilia Clarke, during the filming of the hit HBO drama Game of Thrones, believed she had “cheated death”.
She had two brain hemorrhages at the time.
Appears on the How to Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast, Clarke says: “I was just convinced that I had cheated death and that I was meant to die. Every day that was all I could think about.”
She suffered her first brain haemorrhage while training at a gym in London.
“The best way to describe it is to imagine an elastic band snapping around your brain,” she says. “This crazy pressure”
“At that moment I knew I was suffering from brain damage,” the actress recalls.
At the time, Clarke was involved Game of Thrones.
However, the sudden deterioration in the actress’ health immediately raised fears about her role in the show.
“I felt so ashamed that this had happened and that the people who hired me might see me as weak or something that could be broken.”
Then, years later, a second hemorrhage followed.
Clarke was cast in a Broadway show at the time. But this time the actress suffered more emotionally.
“The biggest thing that happened to me during the second brain haemorrhage was that I fell emotionally silent,” she says.
Clarke founded the brain injury recovery charity SameYou in 2019 after her horrific experiences.
