Emilia Clarke wants you to know that the women of Game of Thrones suffered for their art. Or, at the very least, they were forced to face down heat exhaustion while the men on set had a bit more help.
In late August, Clarke appeared in a video alongside director Paul Feig as part of the Edinburgh International Television Festival. The duo discussed a number of topics, including what it’s like as an actor to film in extreme temperatures. That’s when Clarke revealed that while playing Daenerys Targaryen on GoT, she’d often have to push through the heat while male actors on set received custom “cooling systems” in their costumes.
“What the boys got, we could never do under my costume,” she explained. “The guys in the Night’s Watch—Jon Snow, who’s wearing a woolly mammoth all the time—we’ve got these huge costumes, you can hide whatever the hell you want underneath there, to be quite frank.”
She went on to describe a mechanism that was hidden underneath these heavy wool outfits to keep the actors from overheating. “When we were shooting things in a hot country when they had all of those things, they had this pump,” she said. “This pump that had its own little generator that was attached into the costumes that used to pump cold water into these pipes and cool them all down. So they’d be underneath these huge [costumes] with this weird kind of cooling system.”
“Girls weren’t allowed that,” Clarke added. “All I could get was the back of my wig was allowed to be lifted up every once in a while.”
Check out Clarke’s entire interview for the festival, below.
During the conversation, Emilia Clarke also shared another difficultly she experienced while filming the hit HBO show: Learning all of her lines in Dothraki. Sometimes, the actress revealed, things would become so difficult that Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss would tell her to simply make up the lines.
“There were a couple of takes where I basically did ‘MMMBop,’” Clarke joked. “I’d be like, ‘Emilia, you’ve not made anything, you’ve just rehashed a Hanson classic.'”
