Emilia Clarke Cried When She Read the Game of Thrones Series Finale Script
Warning: Major Game of Thrones spoilers ahead.
Tonight's series finale of Game of Thrones was surprising, to say the least. In a shocking turn of events, Jon Snow (Kit Harington) killed Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and was sentenced to rejoin the Night's Watch. Also, the heads of Westeros appointed Bran Stark as king, and Sansa broke the North from the seven (now six) kingdoms to become queen in the North. The reactions to this finale have been mixed, but no one is more impassioned about it than Emilia Clarke, a.k.a. Dany.
“I cried,” Clarke told Entertainment Weekly about what it was like when she read the script for the first time. “And I went for a walk. I walked out of the house and took my keys and phone and walked back with blisters on my feet. I didn’t come back for five hours. I’m like, ‘How am I going to do this?’”
Interestingly, Kit Harington didn't read the script until the cast's final table read. Clarke was on a flight with Harington before this read-through and had a very hard time not revealing spoilers. When he actually found out what happened, though, his reaction was not good.
“I looked at Emilia and there was a moment of me realizing, ‘No, no…,’” Harington said, according to EW.
Clarke, however, nodded back, "Yes…. He was crying,” she recalls. “And then it was kind of great him not having read it.”
Dany's journey throughout the final season of GoT has been intense. Clarke summed it up perfectly in this quote she gave to EW:
“She genuinely starts with the best intentions and truly hopes there isn’t going to be something scuttling her greatest plans. The problem is [the Starks] don’t like her and she sees it. She goes, ‘Okay, one chance.’ She gives them that chance and it doesn’t work and she’s too far to turn around. She’s made her bed, she’s laying in it. It’s done. And that’s the thing. I don’t think she realizes until it happens — the real effect of their reactions on her is: ‘I don’t give a s—t.’ This is my whole existence. Since birth! She literally was brought into this world going, ‘Run!’ These fuckers have fucked everything up, and now it’s, ‘You’re our only hope.’ There’s so much she’s taken on in her duty in life to rectify, so much she’s seen and witnessed and been through and lost and suffered and hurt. Suddenly these people are turning around and saying, ‘We don’t accept you.’ But she’s too far down the line. She’s killed so many people already. I can’t turn this ship around. It’s too much. One by one, you see all these strings being cut. And there’s just this last thread she’s holding onto: There’s this boy. And she thinks, ‘He loves me, and I think that’s enough.’ But is it enough? Is it? And it’s just that hope and wishing that finally there is someone who accepts her for everything she is and…he fucking doesn’t.”
It's only a matter of time before the theories on this Game of Thrones finale start rolling in. As always, we'll keep you posted.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
