Emilia Clarke became famous fighting alongside dragons on “Game of Thrones,” but it was her own life-threatening illness that has been her fiercest battle.
The 35-year-old actress suffered two brain aneurysms a decade ago and is now opening up about the experience and expressing gratitude for her recovery.
“It was the most excruciating pain,” Clarke told BBC’s “Sunday Morning” program. “It was incredibly helpful to have ‘Game of Thrones’ sweep me up and give me that purpose.”
The first aneurysm occurred in 2011, after working on the first season of the HBO series. A second one followed in 2013.
“The amount of my brain that is no longer usable — it’s remarkable that I am able to speak, sometimes articulately, and live my life completely normally with absolutely no repercussions,” Clarke added. “I am in the really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that.”
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Clarke also described seeing scans of her brain after the aneurysms.
“There’s quite a bit missing,” Clarke said of her brain. “Which always makes me laugh… Strokes, basically, as soon as any part of your brain doesn’t get blood for a second, it’s gone. So the blood finds a different route to get around, but then whatever bit is missing is therefore gone.”
Clarke first disclosed her medical history in 2019 and detailed how she couldn’t remember her name two weeks after undergoing surgery for the first aneurysm. She was diagnosed with aphasia, the same illness Bruce Willis was diagnosed with earlier this year.
"In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug," she wrote in an essay for the New Yorker. "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."
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After returning to the ICU, Clarke’s aphasia turned out to be temporary. “I was able to speak,” she wrote in the article.
Clarke went on to start the charity SameYou, which offers recovery services for brain injury and stroke survivors.
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