Emilia Clarke says she’s been pressured to do nude scenes to “not disappoint Game of Thrones fans” and it’s not okay
Actress Emilia Clarke told fellow actor and host of the Armchair Expert podcast Dax Shepard that she learned how to keep autonomy over her body pretty quickly after being thrown into the nude-scene deep-end on Game of Thrones. However, because of her Thrones nude scenes, Clarke said many people have tried to pressure her into on-screen nudity for other projects, even using the possible “disappointment of her Thrones fans” as leverage.
And, um, that’s just gross.
"I'm a lot more savvy with what I'm comfortable with, and what I am okay with doing," Clarke told Shepard on the latest episode of Armchair Expert, reports Insider.com. "I've had fights on set before where I'm like, 'No, the sheet stays up', and they're like, 'You don't wanna disappoint your Game of Thrones fans.' And I'm like, 'Fuck you.'"
Just because she appeared nude in Thrones does not mean Clarke is down to get naked for whatever project. She told Shepard that it took a lot of convincing herself to actually go through with that first season of Thrones because there was a “fuck-ton of nudity,” as she bluntly explained.
“I approached [it] as a job—if it’s in the script, then it’s clearly needed, this is what this is, and I’m gonna make sense of it…Everything’s gonna be cool,” she said of tackling the on-screen nudity in Thrones.
But actually doing the whole nudity thing was easier said than done for Clarke, who was fresh out of drama school when she landed the part of Daenerys Targaryen.
"I'd been on a film set twice before then, and I'm now on a film set completely naked with all of these people, and I don't know what I'm meant to do and I don't know what's expected of me, and I don't know what you want and I don't know what I want," Clarke told Shepard.
But thanks to her costar Jason Momoa, who played her first on-screen love interest, Khal Drogo, Clarke learned she could set her own rules about how much of her body would actually be on display. “It was definitely hard,” she said of on-screen nudity as a whole. “Which is why the scenes, when I got to do them with Jason, were wonderful, because he was like, ‘No, sweetie, this isn’t okay.’ And I was like, ‘Ohhhh.’”
As Game of Thrones fans ourselves, we would never be disappointed in Emilia Clarke for opting out of scenes that make her feel uncomfortable.
And yes, we speak for all Thrones fans when we say that. If you’re disappointed that Clarke isn’t getting naked in her upcoming films and TV shows, then you’re not a real fan of Emilia Clarke. There. We said it.