Emilia Clarke is opening up about her Game of Thrones experience.
The 39-year-old actress, who plays Daenerys Targaryen in the hit HBO series, recently spoke out about how the show ended, her creative input and time on the series, as well as rumors about how much money she made.
Emilia Clarke responds to salary rumors
During a conversation with Variety, Emilia said that she was able to pay off her parents’ mortgage with her salary from the gig. However, she rejected the reports of $300,000 per episode for the main cast.
“We didn’t earn that much. Can you imagine? I’d have been driving a couple of Porsches!”
She also spent “a lot of time” trying to understand her fame
“I spent a lot of time trying to understand it,” she went on to say of the fame that came with the gig.
“And then you realize it’s just a formula: The less you’re on TV, the less famous you are. It comes and it goes.”
Emilia also spoke about her creative freedom on the show, or lack thereof.
Emilia “did not want” creative input, but was “livid” about Daenerys’ demise
“Aside from what I brought as an actor, I didn’t have any creative input, nor did I want any,” she said, calling the creators “geniuses” while dismissing her younger self as “not qualified.”
When asked if she could have changed the creative teams’ minds about Daenerys’ fate, which she said she was “absolutely livid” about, Emilia said “No,” adding that the creators were “fastidious about us saying the lines exactly as they’ve written them.”
Emilia also revealed that even if she said “it’s” instead of “it is,” they’d ask her to do the take another time.
“I was given the seasons, and I, to the best of my ability, empathized and understood and tracked every choice she made so it felt like mine. I felt like that was what my job was,” she went on to say.
“I have gone through every circuitous route to get to the place that I am now, which is finally being able to be very grateful for everything that Game of Thrones did and has given me. I no longer feel trapped in it, or trapped in the result of being in it. I feel just really lucky that it happened to me — even luckier that I’ve had time to understand what that was, and now I feel firmly on the other side.” she went on to explain.
For more from Emilia, head to Variety.com.
She recently had a very special Game of Thrones reunion as well!
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