The 37-year-old actress was scared her bosses would think she couldn’t do her job correctly.
Actress Emilia Clarke talked about how she thought she would be fired from the HBO Max’s TV series Game of Thrones after she had a brain injury. The 37-year-old said that when people have brain injuries, they feel much more insecure about their jobs.
She feared the producers would think she couldn’t do her job and would fire her from her leading role in the popular fantasy show. Clarke also shared that she thought she was going to die when she had a brain bleed while working out at a gym in north London in 2011.
Emilia Clarke said she didn’t want to tell people about her brain injury and mostly kept it a secret from her Game of Thrones coworkers.
In 2013, doctors found a second brain hemorrhage while she was still playing Daenerys Targaryen in the show. In a new interview with The Big Issue, she talked about how hard it was to go back to work after a brain injury.
“When you have a brain injury, it changes how you see yourself a lot, and you feel much more insecure about your job, The first thing we worried about was: ‘Oh my God, am I going to get fired? Will they think I can’t do the job?’”
Clarke said.
Emilia Clarke returned to work just weeks after her first brain bleed. She remembers feeling so stressed in front of the cameras and crowds that she thought she might be dying from another hemorrhage. She even thought, “Well, if I’m going to die, I better die on live TV.”
After getting better, Clarke and her mom, Jenny, started a charity called SameYou to help people with brain injuries. Both of them received MBEs earlier this year for their work with the charity.
Clarke has said she felt “fragile, sensitive, and scared” after her brain injury. She was surprised to learn how few staff there are in rehabilitation services, so helping with rehab became a main focus for her charity.
Source: DailyMail