Emilia Clarke’s most mortifying audition: “The more I say this, the sketchier it sounds”
With long, ice blonde hair, Emilia Clarke became an iconic Game of Thrones star, playing the dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen to widespread acclaim. However, she soon swapped this out for brown hair and bumblebee tights as she left viewers weeping over Me Before You, before joining the cast of one of Hollywood’s most expensive films – Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Since then, Clarke’s career hasn’t exactly reached the heights of the beloved TV show – a raunchy blend of taboo and fantasy – since it ended in 2019, but it seems like she is still finding her place in the industry. Roles in forgettable romance movies like Last Christmas and The Pod Generation have done little to demonstrate her talents, but perhaps that’s the result of Clarke’s career blowing up so suddenly. She’s never had time to sit back and figure out exactly what she wants to do, resulting in some rather questionable endeavours.
All actors have found themselves at a bit of a crossroads, taking on roles that, really – if they stepped back and assessed – they’d come to realise were not worth it. The worst of these decisions, however, came for Clarke before she got her big break in Game of Thrones, a time she described to the BBC as the “dark days” when she was “fresh out of drama school and doing six jobs that [had] nothing to do with acting”.
During this murky period of trying to make it in the industry, she auditioned for some jobs even more eyebrow-raising than The Pod Generation. Seriously, why did she agree to such a nothing-y film? Anyway, back in the “dark days”, Clarke was down for anything, even if it involved bizarre belly button narratives.
The young Clarke clearly didn’t have many inhibitions holding her back when she was attempting to break into the monolithic world of acting, as reflected in her most mortifying audition story. “The more I say this… the sketchier it sounds… but I went for an audition for an advert. They were saying: ‘We just need you to react to what we are saying.’ They were like: ‘You’ve just come out of the shower, and there’s a guy there, and you start to see there’s something coming out of his belly button… And it’s a weird little man, and the little man starts dancing to some crazy music, and you can’t help but want to dance with him… So, we need you to dance.’”
If you ask me, that sounds like a pretty Lynchian advert, like something out of Mulholland Drive when the shrunken down old people appear on screen as a tormented Naomi Watts reaches for a gun to end her mania. Maybe David Lynch was secretly responsible for this twisted idea for an advertisement, although it obviously wasn’t meant to be.
“Clearly, I never got the part and I never saw the audition,” she admits. It’s probably for the best that Clarke didn’t end up boogie-ing with a shrunken belly-button dweller, because that’s surely something that would come back to haunt her following the success of Game of Thrones.
