Emilia Clarke Admits She Felt Like She ‘Had Cheated Death’ After Two Brain Aneurysms

Emilia Clarke — who became a global star as Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones — revealed in a deeply personal conversation that surviving two brain aneurysms didn’t bring her peace. It brought dread.

“I was just convinced that I had cheated death and I was meant to die and every day, that was all I could think about,” Clarke, 39, said during the Tuesday, May 12 episode of the How to Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast.

The four-time Emmy-nominated actress suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage in February 2011, just after completing the first season of the fantasy epic. As Clarke detailed in her 2019 The New Yorker essay “A Battle for My Life,” emergency surgery followed, along with aphasia — a condition that temporarily robbed her of the ability to speak. Doctors then informed her that a second, smaller aneurysm sat on the other side of her brain. By 2013, it had doubled in size, and the resulting surgery was far more invasive, requiring her skull to be opened.

Rather than finding strength in her survival, Clarke told the podcast she withdrew from the world entirely. “The biggest thing that happened to me with the second one was I shut down emotionally,” she said. “It became this thing where I just couldn’t look anyone in the eye.”

She described the isolating weight of carrying an injury no one could see. “You’re walking around knowing that your body failed you. Your brain has failed you… and no one else can see it,” Clarke said.

The anxiety didn’t stay behind hospital walls, either. Clarke opened up about attending San Diego Comic-Con with her Game of Thrones castmates shortly after her second surgery — only to be gripped by a headache and the terrifying certainty that it was happening all over again.

“My publicist was like, ‘Right, we got to do this live interview with MTV’ and I was like, ‘I think I’m going to die. I think it’s happening,'” she recalled, joking darkly that if it were going to happen, it might as well be on live television.

Still, Clarke credits her career with pulling her through. “Without my work, I don’t know what I would have done,” she said, adding, “I was blessed that after each of my brain injuries, in my mind, there was no other option but to carry on.”