Emilia Clarke has said she wanted to ‘disappear completely’ amid her terrifying brain aneurysms, likening them to being attacked on social media.
The Game Of Thrones star, who’s been open about her ordeal with her health, also revealed how she feared being recognised even in hospital at the height of the show’s success.
Switching up her Mother Of Dragons side for an angelic look as she covered Wonderland magazine, Emilia explained: ‘I do feel like the brain hemorrhages are the literal, physical embodiment of what it is to be attacked on a 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.’
And, despite being grateful for the success of the show, the star revealed that the fandom had its ugly sides, as she even feared being recognised in hospital.
‘This is where you very quickly sound like a complete f***ing d**k because we signed up for this, we asked for this, it’s part of the job,’ the 33-year-old acknowledged.
‘And then you’re in a shopping centre with your mum who is crying over your recently dead dad and someone comes up and asks you for a picture and you say no and they’re like, “I expected better from you, I thought more of you than that.”‘
Emilia, who’s currently starring in festive movie Last Christmas, written by Emma Thompson, has been open about her health struggles in the past.
Writing for the New Yorker, she recalled how the issues started when she felt unwell during a training session not long after wrapping up filming for season one of Game Of Thrones in 2011.
She was immediately rushed to hospital where she received a ‘quick and ominous’ diagnosis that she was had a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), which is a life-threatening type of stroke caused by bleeding into the area surrounding the brain.
Emilia suffered from a condition known as aphasia following surgery, which caused her to struggle to remember her own name.
‘I asked the medical staff to let me die. My job — my entire dream of what my life would be — centered on language, on communication. Without that, I was lost. I was sent back to the I.C.U. and, after about a week, the aphasia passed. I was able to speak,’ she wrote.
The star then revealed that her health has improved in the years since ‘beyond [her] most unreasonable hopes’ and it now at ‘a hundred per cent’.
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