Emilia Clarke has banned fans from taking pictures with her after someone asked for a selfie – while she was having a panic attack.
During an appearance on Jessie Ware’s Table Manners podcast, the Game Of Thrones favourite recalled the moment a man approached her for a snap, despite her being in floods of tears.
‘I was genuinely walking through an airport and I suddenly started having what I can only believe to be a panic attack brought on by complete exhaustion,’ the 33-year-old began.
‘I was on my own, I was on the phone to my mum saying, “I feel like I can’t breathe, I don’t know what’s going on”.
‘I’m there and the tears are coming out. I’m crying and crying, this guy’s like, “Can I get a selfie?” And I was like, “I can’t breathe, I’m really sorry. Just having a minute”.
‘It was after a few moments like that where I was like, “I don’t know how to do this”.’
And Emilia revealed that the interaction left her questioning how she deals with fans.
‘So I started to say, I’m not going to take a photo but I will sign something,’ she continued.
‘When you do that you have to have an interaction with that person, as opposed to someone just going, ‘Oi, give us a selfie, goodbye’.
‘It turns into, “Right, what’s your name? Who am I making it out to?”
‘Then you have a chat and you’re actually having a truthful human-to-human thing, as opposed to it being this other thing that probably isn’t nice for them and isn’t that nice for you.’
‘When someone asks for a selfie, I want to be able to provide for them what they’re after.
‘I signed up for it, I knew what was going on… I’m just trying to navigate how I can do it without feeling like my soul is completely empty, because they don’t really want to talk to you.’
Elsewhere in the episode, Emilia also opened up about her fear of being fired from Game Of Thrones over her brain aneurysms.
The actress – who is known as Mother Of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen – had two aneurysms at the beginning of her stint on the fantasy drama, for which she required brain surgery.
And she admitted she was scared to tell the production team about the life-threatening illness.
‘With the first one, I couldn’t let them know what had happened until they knew that I wasn’t going to die,’ she explained.
‘So it took us three weeks to be like, “sorry for not answering the old emails. I’ve just been a bit, you know… I’m fine! By the way, everything’s great. I’m totally fine. I’m going to be back to work, nothing wrong’s with me. I’m all good.”
‘I just was, and consistently, so scared of being fired for whatever reason,’ she added.
‘So I was just like… that was just me, more than [them]. I had no idea how taken care of I was.’
Thankfully, Emilia has fully recovered, and has now launched a charity following her diagnosis.
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