Game Of Thrones star Emilia Clarke feared she’d die on the set of the HBO epic, after suffering a brain aneurysm in 2011.
The actress, who played Daenerys Targaryen, went through a health scare after the first season of the series, and went straight back to work after having emergency surgery – however she developed anxiety while on set and was constantly worried she would have another dangerous aneurysm.
Speaking about her fears now, Emilia has shared she was in ‘constant fear’ of having another health scare and dying on set.
She said in the upcoming book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, via Vulture: ‘I had the consistent fear that I was going to have another brain aneurysm. I spent a lot of time just being like: “Am I gonna die? Is that gonna happen on set? Because that would be really inconvenient.” And with any kind of brain injury it leaves you with a fatigue that’s indescribable. I was trying so hard to keep it under wraps.’
Emilia’s condition was so sensitive at the time, that she even had to bow out of a scheduled interview after filming a scene for the show in a hot desert in Croatia, because she had developed ‘heatstroke’.
But the actress says she ‘never put self-health first’ whilst filming the popular fantasy series, because she didn’t want to let anyone down.
She went on: ‘In all of my years on the show, I never put self-health first, which is probably why everyone else was worrying, as they could see that. They didn’t want to work me too hard.
‘I was like: “Don’t think I’m a failure; don’t think I can’t do the job that I’ve been hired to do. Please don’t think I’m going to f*** up at any moment.”
‘I had the Willy Wonka golden ticket. I wasn’t about to hand that in.’
The actor eventually did suffer a second aneurysm in 2013, and previously said she wanted to ‘disappear’ following her health scares.
She told Wonderland magazine: ‘I do feel like the brain haemorrhages are the literal, physical embodiment of what it is to be attacked on social media, because I didn’t want to look anyone in the eye, and I didn’t want anyone to recognise me.
‘I wanted to disappear completely, to wipe myself off the face of the earth, because I couldn’t handle the level of interaction. Because I felt totally laid bare, totally vulnerable, totally in pain.’
Thankfully the star has been able to recover, and while she initially struggled to tell people for fear of being considered ‘an actress with a sob story’, Emilia finally told her story to the New Yorker as she launched a charity in light of her diagnosis.
