Emilia Clarke reveals she suffered two brain aneurysms during Game of Thrones' early years

The New Yorker

In a New Yorker personal essay, Clarke -- who is launching the charity SameYou today to help people recovering from brain injuries and stroke -- reveals for the first time that she had to undergo brain surgery after filming Game of Thrones Season 1 and Season 3. "Just when all my childhood dreams seemed to have come true, I nearly lost my mind and then my life," she writes. "I’ve never told this story publicly, but now it’s time." Clarke says she first started feeling neurological symptoms in February 2011, at age 24, after filming Season 1 and two months before the Game of Thrones series premiere on HBO. The first surgery was "minimally invasive," meaning they didn't open up her skull. "Brain surgery? I was in the middle of my very busy life—I had no time for brain surgery," she writes. Because of her recovery, filming on Season 2 proved challenging. "On the first day of shooting for Season 2, in Dubrovnik, I kept telling myself, 'I am fine, I’m in my twenties, I’m fine,'" she writes. "I threw myself into the work. But, after that first day of filming, I barely made it back to the hotel before I collapsed of exhaustion. On the set, I didn’t miss a beat, but I struggled. Season 2 would be my worst. I didn’t know what Daenerys was doing. If I am truly being honest, every minute of every day I thought I was going to die." The second aneurysm occurred in 2013, while she was living in New York City to work on the Broadway play Breakfast at Tiffany's. Clarke writes that she went in for a brain scan, when she learned that a growth on the other side of her brain had doubled in size. After a minor procedure to take care of it failed, Clarke said doctors "needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way—through my skull. And the operation had to happen immediately. The recovery was even more painful than it had been after the first surgery. I looked as though I had been through a war more gruesome than any that Daenerys experienced." Clarke said she feared that news of her second surgery would leak -- she even denied it when asked by a National Enquirer reporter. A few weeks after the surgery, Clarke had to promote Game of Thrones at San Diego Comic-Con, where she was so ill she feared she was going to die amid all the promotion and interviews. "I figured, if I’m going to go, it might as well be on live television," she recalls. Clarke adds: "But now, after keeping quiet all these years, I’m telling you the truth in full," she writes. "Please believe me: I know that I am hardly unique, hardly alone. Countless people have suffered far worse, and with nothing like the care I was so lucky to receive."