British actress Emilia Clarke has spoken out about the pressure she felt to appear in nude scenes for Game of Thrones.
The 33-year-old, who played Daenerys Targaryen for the entire eight seasons, addressed the issue on the podcast Armchair Expert.
During her chat with host Dax Shepard, Clarke agreed that performing the nude scenes were terrifying. Although Clarke has previously defended the show’s salacious nature in the past, in the podcast she revealed that it was “overwhelming” discovering the amount of nudity in the scripts.
Clarke was fresh out of drama school and relatively inexperienced when she landed the role as the Mother of Dragons. The actress told Shepard that her fellow Game of Thrones actor, Jason Momoa, was particularly helpful on set. “He took care of me, he really did. In an environment where I didn’t know I needed to be taken care of,” Clarke told Shepard.
“It’s only now that I realize how fortunate I was with that because that could have gone many many many different ways,” Clarke goes on to say. “Because Jason had experience, he had done a bunch of stuff before coming on to this, he was like, ‘Sweetie, this is how it’s meant to be and this is how it’s not meant to be, and I’m going to make sure that’s the way it goes. He was so kind and considerate and cared about me as a human being.”
During the podcast, Clarke said she is “a lot savvier” when it comes to indicating what she isn’t comfortable doing on set these days. She also explained that there was definitely a pressure to perform a certain way for the show’s fans.
“I’ve had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up,’ and they’re like, ‘No, you don’t wanna disappoint your Game of Thrones fans.’ And I’m like, ‘F*** you.'”
In the past, Emilia Clarke has told the press that she turned down the role of the lead character in Fifty Shades of Grey because she didn’t want to become known for doing nude scenes.
“I’ll never say, ‘I’m never doing nudity’ because I’ve already done it, but I thought I might get stuck in a pigeonhole that I would have struggled to get out of,” she told Marie Claire.
