In Game of Thrones’s Daenerys Targaryen, Emilia Clarke has created one of the strongest, most enduring female characters in our pop-culture consciousness. So where does all that fire come from?
She wasn’t the first choice to play Daenerys Targaryen. The part supposedly called for a tall, willowy blonde, but when the pilot episode of Game of Thrones ran into problems, Emilia Clarke, a then-22-year-old Londoner—petite, curvy, and blond only by dint of that now-trademark platinum wig— dove headlong into her audition.
“We intentionally chose heavier scenes requiring a bold, Joan of-Arc faith in herself that extends beyond the bounds of reason,” wrote the show’s cocreators, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, via tandem e-mail from Los Angeles, where they were adding final touches to the seventh and penultimate GOT season, which begins airing July 16. “We watched her audition on a tiny, two-inch-by-two-inch video window on a computer in David’s kitchen. Then we met her in London—this fun, friendly, easygoing person who was about fivefoot-nothing. And we were like, ‘You did that?! Do it again!’ So she did, and we knew she was the one.”
This story is from the August 2017 edition of ELLE.
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This story is from the August 2017 edition of ELLE.
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