The movie Emilia Clarke was crushed to lose: “I’ve never wanted a role as much”
There’s currently much excitement amongst fans of dragons, power struggles, seemingly endless torture scenes and implied incest because HBO have just announced yet another Game of Thrones spin-off, but this time a movie, an actual GOT film, and it’s going to be based around the Targaryens, Queen of whom is of course, Emilia Clarke.
Well, her character Daenerys Targaryen is anyway, but so inseparable is Clarke from that role that we all know she’s who we think of when anyone mentions the show, because not only did her white twisty hair inspire worldwide copycats, but also because she was certifiably cool as fuck, dealing with anyone who even remotely upset her by basically letting her trio of enormous dragons fry them to a screaming crisp while she casually looked on.
Sadly, Clarke is unlikely to be popping up in the new film, given it’s a prequel set 300 years before the events of the TV show, but you never know, it’s full of magic after all, maybe they’ll do some kind of clever flash forward or something. Because it’s somehow already almost seven years since we waved goodbye to Westeros the first time round, and even though Clarke has done plenty of films and TV in the interim, there hasn’t been anything that’s got us quite as excited.
But it would take some doing, given that only last month Clarke said that she was done with the fantasy genre for good, telling Variety: “You’re highly unlikely to see me get on a dragon, or even in the same frame as a dragon, ever again.”
Plus, there’s the fact that Jon Snow (spoiler alert) killed her with a knife, and a dragon flew off with her body at the end of the series, which would make a return even more difficult.
Clarke had already begun to put her future career in place before the final episodes of GOT, appearing in the ‘ehh it’s fine’ Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018 and another huge franchise in Terminator Genisys three years previously. But since her role as queen of the dragons came to a close, she’s moved away from blockbusters, instead doing some more TV with Marvel’s Secret Invasion with Samuel L Jackson, which nobody really remembers, and this year’s Ponies, the spy thriller series set in the 1970s, which critics loved.
She has only worked very sporadically in movies, just three in fact, since 2019, but she did miss out on a sci-fi film from 2014 that she wanted, only for it to go to another actor who was up and coming at the time. Asked by Glamour about which role she wanted that she didn’t get, Clarke said: “The robot in Ex Machina. I mean, Alicia Vikander is brilliant in it. Looking at the performance now, I was so wrong for it.”
Alex Garland’s film was a thriller that proved to be a decade ahead of its time, as Oscar Isaac’s power-crazed tech CEO puts Domhnall Gleeson through the wringer at his futuristic pad, albeit with the slight bonus of some robot sex with Vikander’s AI-powered female helper. It was something of a word-of-mouth hit and was nominated for two Oscars, one for Garland for Best Screenplay and one for Best Visual Effects, which it won.
While she hasn’t got any sci-fi coming up, Clarke does have some projects in the works that sound interesting, including a new TV series alongside Sons of Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam called Criminal, and a film called An Ideal Wife in which she plays the partner of Oscar Wilde.
