The Razzie-winning role Emilia Clarke instantly turned down: “No way am I going to walk into that”
As a four-time Primetime Emmy-nominated actor, Emilia Clarke is quite clearly not too shabby at her job. However, her decision-making has been suspect at times, especially when blockbusters are involved.
She faced the daunting task of stepping into Linda Hamilton’s shoes as Sarah Connor in Terminator Genisys and absolutely shit the bed, with Clarke the first person to hold her hands up and admit that the movie didn’t turn out anywhere near as well as she’d initially expected when she signed on.
Her second spectacle-fuelled outing came in Solo: A Star Wars Story, and through no fault of her own, that movie shit the bed, too. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were dismissed during shooting, Ron Howard was brought in to drag it across the finish line, and the end result was the lowest-grossing live-action Star Wars film ever, which also killed off Lucasfilm’s anthology experiment.
Clarke’s third and so far final foray into the world of franchise filmmaking came when she was cast as a shapeshifting alien in Marvel’s streaming series, Secret Invasion. Despite giving Samuel L Jackson his first leading role in one of the studio’s comic book adaptations, it was so bad that not even the superhero stable’s most ardent fans could defend it.
It doesn’t make for the most encouraging reading, but she made the right call in turning down the main character in a trilogy that would earn north of $1.3 billion at the box office. Not just because it was shite, which is definitely was, but because her Game of Thrones tenure had taught her a valuable lesson about boundaries, what kind of characters she wants to play, and why she doesn’t want to play others again.
“I love her, and I thought her vision was beautiful,” Clarke explained to The Hollywood Reporter, reflecting on why she’d turned down Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey. “But the last time I was naked on camera was a long time ago, and yet, it is the only question that I ever get asked because I am a woman.”
“And it’s annoying as hell, and I’m sick and tired of it because I did it for a character; I didn’t do it so some guy could check out my tits, for god’s sake,” she continued. “So that, coming up, I was like, ‘I can’t’. I did a minimal amount, and I’m pigeonholed for life.”
Having been on the receiving end of so many weird, queasy, and creepy inquiries about her previous nude scenes, it was a matter of principle for the actor, who was adamant there was “no way am I going to voluntarily walk into that situation and then never be able to look someone in the eye and be like, ‘No, you can’t keep asking me this question,'” which is about as valid a reason as anyone could have.
Clarke knew exactly what would happen if she’d played Anastasia Steele, and she was right to avoid it, and not just because Johnson won the Razzie for ‘Worst Actress’ in a film that made a killing in cinemas before going on to claim additional trophies for ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Actor’, ‘Worst Screen Combo’, and ‘Worst Screenplay’.
