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For years, Hollywood star Emilia Clarke didn’t speak publicly about suffering two brain hemorrhages in her twenties. “It still took years for me to grapple with my truth,” she said in a speech Wednesday after she was honored at Variety’s Power of Women London event.
When Clarke shared her experience in 2019, “we were overwhelmed by the response,” she added as she opened up about the long-term consequences of her ordeal.
“In 2011, I didn’t want anyone to know about my brain bleeds,” said the British actress, who is best known for playing Daenerys Targaryen in “Game of Thrones. “I was ashamed and overwhelmed by a diagnosis I didn’t understand.”
“Fifteen years after my first bleed, I have the hindsight to see how difficult that time truly was,” she added.
After suffering two hemorrhages – one in 2011 and another in 2013 – she says she “never had the chance to reflect on what my two brain traumas had done to me because I could walk, talk, be myself, remember my lines and was back on camera within weeks of both brain injuries.”
Clarke, 39, said she tried to downplay other consequences. “I ignored what was going on with my hormones, or rather my lack of them, my extreme fatigue that no one else I knew in their 20s suffered,” she said.
“What about my anxiety? Surely that is normal working in our image obsessed industry? Breaking a rib after filming a sex scene? Well, maybe that was his fault. But sometimes even blacking out after long night shoots? The pain all over my body? I didn’t even think I should find out why. I just put it down as stress and my non-stop work schedule, that I wasn’t too good at coping with. I thought I had been fixed. So did my doctors. None of us could see the pattern, so I just blamed myself.”