Born To Rule

In Game of Thrones’ 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?

- Joseph Hooper

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 blonde only by dint of that now-trademark platinum wig – dived 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 co-creators David Benioff and DB Weiss via tandem email from Los Angeles, where they were adding final touches to the seventh and penultimate GOT season, now on our screens. “We watched her audition on a tiny video window on a computer in David’s kitchen. Then we met her in London – this fun, friendly, easygoing person who was about five-foot-nothing. And we were like, ‘You did that?! Do it again!’ So she did, and we knew she was the one.”

The casting revealed its perfection from the first episode – the story of a young queen coming into her power, bound up with an erotic coming-of-age. We get a glimpse of Daenerys’ future capabilities when she’s literally tossed into an arranged marriage bed with the muscle-bound 193cm-tall ruler of the semi-barbarian Dothraki clan. This fragile-looking, tiny woman, until then a virgin, soon has him in her sexual thrall, ready to seek world domination at her bidding. Death soon removes Khal Drogo from the picture (a fate that seems to await most