Much to discuss here, and there are lots more photos within the magazine. The profile itself is… scattershot, as was the interview, I suspect. The writer seems to have tried to stitch this together, and in a way I appreciate that it wasn’t overwritten in that process, but it’s still a very surface read (and, in fact, deals very little with “Life after Game of Thrones” except to list what IMDb says she’s doing).
It opens with a poorly told anecdote about Emilia’s cultural heritage, which is sort of loosely joined to the next bit, and then we come to a screeching halt with what COULD have been a super sad story about her father’s death and how hard it was for her to go back and forth from a movie set in the U.S. — but just as you’re thinking, “Oh, that could be really emotionally complex, let’s hear about it,” we move on to… Prince Charming? And then, confusingly, with no further shading, we get this about her getting into acting:
Early on she would get frustrated that she didn’t have the right look. “It got me angry. Well, no, not angry. ‘Angry’ is the wrong word. But it pushed me into another casting type; forced me to be an actor. Instead of playing Juliet and doing the light, airy stuff, I would be the granny who cracks wise, or a down-and-out hooker who has seen better days.” The types of characters one finds in a place like Westeros.
I am… confused. For starters, none of those descriptions connect with the character she plays on Game of Thrones. Daenarys is basically a heart-throb. Second, why did she or anyone think she doesn’t have the right look? That’s difficult to process for those of us who see her now. Besides which, even though Me Before You was ostensibly sad, her character was meant to be light and airy. So this backstory is both hard to connect with unless she provides more explanation, and also goes against work she’s currently doing — so it’d be nice to know how and when that transition came about, too. Like, no one is casting Emilia Clarke as a grandmother, or down-and-out washed-up prostitute, and they’re not even considering it. (Although she IS remarkably terrible in Me Before You, so maybe she SHOULD go for the grittier stuff again.)(Although my unpopular opinion is that she’s not good on Game of Thrones either.) Where are the follow-up details?
And then it ends somewhat abruptly, in a way that makes me sympathize deeply with the writer’s desperate search for a button. Give it a read; it’s low-commitment. And the other photos are worth a squizz, at the very least.
[Photos: Harper’s Bazaar]
