ACTRESS
She has suffered extraordinary personal trauma, but the star has come out fighting, with an even more powerful on-screen presence and a heightened sense of purpose
WOMEN of the YEAR
EMILIA CLARKE IS BAREFOOT, RUNNING DOWN a back street alongside London’s Savoy Hotel. Hitching her feathered Valentino dress up above her knees for extra speed, she flashes past, her hair flowing behind her. The photographer Betina du Toit snaps quickly, before they both retreat into the building, relieved not to have been caught by any security guards. ‘For the sake of fashion…!’ Clarke exclaims.
The actress is clearly up for a challenge. And, over the past 12 years, there have been plenty of challenges, starting with growing up professionally on Game of Thrones, a series that was attracting an average of 44 million viewers when it concluded in 2019. The audience became so emotionally involved in her character Daenerys Targaryen’s trajectory from mild-mannered princess to the Mother of Dragons that, even now, some find it difficult to associate Clarke with anything else. Yet she has since taken on a variety of roles, including action heroines (she played Sarah Connor in Terminator Genisys, opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the resistance fighter G’iah in the latest Marvel spin-off series, The Secret Invasion) alongside leading parts, notably in Emma Thompson’s Last Christmas and the adaptation of Jojo Moyes’ novel Me Before You.
Clarke is unable to talk about any of these past projects, due to her support for the SAG-AFTRA strikes, and is thrilled that she’s forbidden from revisiting old Thrones ground (‘because I have literally nothing new to say!’), as it frees her to discuss her forthcoming independent films and enterprises, as well as her side hustle creating comics. In 2020, she conceived and cowrote, with the artist Leila Leiz, a satirical comic book titled MOM: Mother of Madness (which she characterises as ‘Deadpool meets Fleabag’) whose heroine is Maya, a single mother of an autistic son, who has special powers she can access when she has a period. ‘I wanted to use the menstrual cycle as an allegory for everything we don’t like about ourselves,’ she says. ‘Periods make us feel insecure – I can still get embarrassed buying tampons in Sainsbury’s. I thought it was an interesting spin – that the thing we don’t like is actually what gives us our power.’
We meet again after the shoot on a quiet Friday afternoon in the top-floor Soho office of Clarke’s production company Magical Thinking Pictures, w
