On the morning of February 11, 2011, shortly after finishing the first season of Game of Thrones, Emilia Clarke was working out at a gym in Crouch End, North London, when suddenly she felt an excruciating pain inside her head that felt like a rubber band snapping and creating an enormous amount of pressure in her head. She had suffered a hemorrhagic stroke and bleeding inside the brain and she knew straight away, while trying to move her toes to see if she had lost the ability to move, that something was wrong with her brain. She underwent surgery and they told her that she had a smaller aneurysm in the other side of her brain, but that they wouldn’t touch it as they thought it would stay dormant indefinitely. She had a painful recovery and despite feeling every single day like she was about to die, she went back to her life and filmed the second season of the show.
Unbeknownst to her, there was a swollen blood vessel developing in her brain, which was cutting of blood flow to part of her brain, which unfortunately caused that part to die and two years after the first surgery, after she finished filming the third season of Game of Thrones, she was told she needed to have another surgery.
Knowing she would have to undergo another surgery and the fact that part of her brain had died made her deeply depressed. She told CBS:
The second one, there was a bit of my brain that actually died. If a part of your brain doesn’t get blood to it, it will just no longer work. It’s like your short circuit. So, I had that and they didn’t know what it was. That was a deep paranoia, from the first one as well. I was like, ‘What if something has short-circuited in my brain and I can’t act anymore?’ Literally, it’s been my reason for living for a very long time.
The second surgery failed due to a massive haemorrhage that made her wake up screaming in pain, and they told her that they would have to go through the skull in order to treat her and parts of her skull would be replaced with titanium, and they had to do it immediately.
What gave her strength, and made her become the positive and happy person she normally is, was Daenerys. Playing that character and being able to remember the lines she thought she wouldn’t be able to remember, made her rise from the ashes once again, and continue to shine on screen.
You go on set, and you play a badass, and you walk through fire, and that became the thing that just saved me from considering my own mortality.
She kept this hidden from the public and her colleagues until shortly before the premiere of the last season of Game of Thrones, when she revealed it all in an essay she wrote for The New Yorker:
The essay received much public acclaim and people praised her for opening up in such an honest way and for her bravery to continue to work despite the horrendous recovery she endured both times, getting her to the point of asking the medical staff to let her die. Much like her character, she showed the world how fierce she truly is.