Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke opens up about brain surgery ordeal

The Game of Thrones star, Emilia Clarke, in a very emotional article in The New Yorker revealed she had to undergo brain surgery between two seasons of the hit series.

Emilia Clarke opens up on how she suffered two “life-threatening” aneurysms. She experienced her first aneurysm in 2011. She had been working out before collapsing in a toilet with “shooting, stabbing, constricting pain”. Clarke was then diagnosed with having a subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH), from which a third of sufferers die immediately or soon after.

In 2013, while performing for a play in New York, she received brain surgery for a second aneurysm on the other side of her brain.

After the surgery, a condition called aphasia set in, meaning she could not communicate and feared her acting career was over.

“In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug,” she said. “I asked the medical staff to let me die.”

She recovered enough to return to filming Season 2 of Game of Thrones but said: “I was often so woozy, so weak, that I thought I was going to die.”

The actor, who plays Daenerys Targaryen, underwent surgery twice, leading to “terrible anxiety” and panic attacks.

Despite thinking she would die, Clarke has now recovered beyond her “most unreasonable hopes”.

The British actress, who is from Oxford, plays a young princess sold into marriage who she describes as “a figure of power and self-possession”.

 

Via The New Yorker