Actress Emilia Clarke is revealing the secrets of the hit fantasy show.
Yes, of course, the dragons that are the ‘babies’ of her character are not real. But neither, it turns out, is her hair.
‘This is all wig,’ she says with a grin, touching the silver-blonde mane that flows with queen-like elegance from her head.
‘There’s nothing real here. It takes two-and-a-half hours every day.’
The
painstaking process of transforming the dark-haired 28-year-old
Londoner into Daenerys Targaryen – aka Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea –
is tackled with the kind of attention to detail that is typical of the
HBO drama.
‘They
braid my hair so it’s like cornrows, then they tie and pin that, then
glue a bald cap, then paint the bald cap, then they glue the wig on and
pin it and cut it to size, then dress it.’
Clarke is one of the breakout stars of Game Of Thrones.
Hollywood
sources suggest that, alongside other core members of the cast, she’ll
be earning over $7 million per series by the time production begins on
the seventh season next autumn.
She
was nominated for a 2013 Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a
Drama Series, played Jude Law’s daughter in Dom Hemingway (2013) and
starred as Holly Golightly on Broadway in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
As a mark of
just how big a deal she now is on the back of Game Of Thrones, she was
also offered the saucy female lead in Fifty Shades Of Grey – a part she
declined with ‘no regrets’, saying that she had ‘done nudity before and
was concerned with being labelled for doing it again’.
In
the show’s first series Clarke was notoriously filmed naked in many of
her key scenes although by series four she had resorted to wearing
clothes – perhaps more befitting her regal position.
Game
Of Thrones has never stinted on sex scenes, as Clarke acknowledges:
‘We’ve been able to take it to a very real level. It was never
pretending to be a show for kids! It’s gritty in a good, realistic
way.’
And,
as she jokes, ‘There are other women who remove items of clothing on
Game Of Thrones, so they’ve got my nipple count down now.’
That
said, she admits that when she started filming the show in 2010 some of
the scenes were shocking, including an initiation ritual in which she
ate a horse’s heart.
‘It
tasted like congealed jam, with a hint of bleach. I did the occasional
double-take during season one when I saw the script but now, less so.
As for the three dragons, they’ve grown in size in tandem with the exploding popularity of the show.
In season two, the scaly creatures were cute and pet-sized, burping the occasional puff of smoke.
They
were a good fit, in a way, for the dainty, 5ft 2in actress. To film the
scenes, the show’s ‘Mother of Dragons’ recalls how the special-effects
team would give her full-size replica models.
'Drogon would sit on my shoulder, Rhaegal in my arms, Viserion would be around somewhere.
'They’d
attach them, so we could do a camera rehearsal and I would know the
size, then they’d take them away and there’s genuinely nothing there
apart from marker dots.’
‘Daenerys is
a really good vehicle for reaching out to the women as well... You’re
looking at a world that is incredibly male-orientated. And you’re seeing
a more archaic view of the male/female divide than you do now.
'It takes ten times the guts to be a woman there than in modern-day society because you’re up against so much more.
'With Game Of Thrones, the women are more interesting than the guy characters. I would say that, though!’
So,
season five is almost upon us. Come the fateful battle between the
warring ‘houses’, will Daenerys triumph? Will she, finally, take her
seat on the Iron Throne?
‘I’m rooting for Dany the whole way!’ Clarke laughs.
‘I mean, she has dragons! How is somebody going to come up against that? Seriously? They can’t.’
