Game of Thrones Star Emilia Clarke Thought She Was Meant to Die After Second Brain Hemorrhage

Emilia Clarke has always seemed like one of those impossibly upbeat stars, but it turns out her Game of Thrones run wasn’t just physically demanding because of dragons and cold sets — she was, quite literally, fighting for her life behind the scenes. On a recent How To Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast appearance, Clarke got brutally honest about her health scares while filming Thrones, including not one, but two brain hemorrhages.

Life-or-Death Behind the Scenes

Clarke said the first hemorrhage hit her out of nowhere. We’re talking right after she’d wrapped season one, mid-workout at a London gym, when suddenly: blinding pain like an 'elastic band just snapping around your brain.' Her description is basically what you hope never happens on leg day.

She felt the kind of pressure that makes you instantly realize something is horribly wrong. Vomiting from pain, she remembers thinking, 'In that moment, I knew I was being brain damaged.' And as she was waiting for help, her biggest fear? Not death, but losing her career as an actor. Welcome to Hollywood priorities.

Clarke says doctors initially couldn’t figure out what was happening, which had to make things extra terrifying. It took a brain scan to confirm that, yes, she had just survived a serious brain bleed.

Keeping It Under Wraps

If you’re thinking she just pressed pause and took time off — think again. Clarke was determined not to let HBO see her as 'weak' (her words). She did her best to keep the whole thing a secret from most people on the show, only giving a heads-up to showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. She admits, 'I just didn't want anyone to know.'

'I was just convinced that I had cheated death and I was meant to die. Every day, that's all I could think about.'

It’s hard to overstate how much this was weighing on her. Clarke explained that for ages after the second hemorrhage, she could only focus on the fact she’d survived — and wasn’t convinced she was supposed to. Basically, Thrones might have been her big break, but she was privately haunted by a sense of doom.

From Survivor to Advocate

There’s at least a silver lining to all this trauma: Clarke turned her experience into something positive (and pretty rare for celebrity charity efforts, it’s genuinely personal). In 2019, she started SameYou, a charity aimed at helping people recover from brain injuries — with a focus on rehab and chipping away at the loneliness survivors often face.

• Two brain hemorrhages while filming Game of Thrones
• Collapsed after season one at a gym, suffered intense pain and confusion
• Kept the ordeal private from most of the cast and crew
• Pushed through work out of fear of losing her career
• Launched SameYou in 2019 to support neurorehabilitation and recovery

So the next time you see her on screen, remember: she’s not just a dragon queen, she’s a real-life survivor who managed to keep her most vulnerable battles off-script — and then turned them into a mission to help others.