Emilia Clarke Felt Pressured Into Filming Nude Scenes In 'Game Of Thrones'

Photo credit: HBO
Photo credit: HBO

From Esquire

Emilia Clarke says she felt pressured to shoot nude scenes in the early seasons of Game of Thrones, with the intimation that she would have been letting fans down if she didn't take her clothes off.

"I'm a lot more savvy [now] with what I’m comfortable with, and what I am okay with doing," Clarke told the Armchair Expert podcast. "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.'"

There was a lot of nudity in the early seasons of Thrones – or as Clarke put it, a "fuck ton of nudity" – and as a 23-year-old actor with very little experience on sets, she says she didn't appreciate at the time quite how far the power dynamic was skewed against her.

"I’d come fresh from drama school, and 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."

Clarke added that Jason Momoa was a very useful ally on set, and would encourage her to speak out when she felt uncomfortable. However, the feeling that she had no control persisted.

"I'm floating through this first season and I have no idea what I’m doing, I have no idea what any of this is," she said. "I've never been on a film set like this before, 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."

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