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- Emila Clarke is a British actress best known for playing Daenerys Targaryen in ‘Game of Thrones’
- The star suffered her first of two brain aneurysms in 2011
- After her first brain surgery, Emilia said she ‘wanted to pull the plug’
Emilia Clarke was working at a museum when she got a call to audition for HBO’s Game of Thrones in 2010. The British beauty, then 23, landed the role of Daenerys, the Targaryen queen and “Mother of dragons,” and soon became a household name. Now stans are licking their chops to see her in the upcoming Marvel television project called Secret Invasion, where Emilia plays a human/alien hybrid with pyrokinesis powers.
Despite all her success, Emilia was suffering in silence after the first season wrapped on Game of Thrones in 2011, as she battled her first of two brain aneurysms. “When all my childhood dreams seemed to have come true, I nearly lost my mind and then my life,” she told The New Yorker in March 2019. “I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture. If I was to live and avoid terrible deficits, I would have to have urgent surgery. And, even then, there were no guarantees.”
Emilia is also very open about the aneurysms on her Instagram. Here’s everything else to know about her health struggles, how she’s doing today, and more.
Emilia Clarke Diagnosed With A Brain Aneurysm
Emilia said she was working out in a gym in London in February 2011 when she experienced a painful sensation in her brain. “My trainer had me get into the plank position and I immediately felt as though an elastic band were squeezing my brain,” she wrote for The New Yorker. “Somehow, almost crawling, I made it to the locker room. I reached the toilet, sank to my knees and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill. Meanwhile, the pain — shooting, stabbing, constricting pain — was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening — my brain was damaged.”
After being rushed to the hospital, Emilia was diagnosed with subarachnoid hemorrhage and underwent an emergency three-hour surgery. Afterwards, in the hospital, she suffered aphasia, a condition where damage to the brain affects a person’s ability to speak and write. “In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug,” she explained. “I asked the medical staff to let me die.”
Two years later, a brain scan revealed a smaller growth in her brain had doubled in size since the last surgery. The second brain aneurysm would be a much more difficult surgery and recovery. “The procedure had failed. I had a massive bleed and the doctors made it plain that my chances of surviving were precarious if they didn’t operate again. This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way — through my skull.”
What Is A Brain Aneurysm?
A brain aneurysm is a bulge in the wall of an artery which can cause life-threatening bleeding if it grows and bursts, according to the National Institutes of Health. Also called cerebral aneurysms, brain aneurysms affect 3% to 5% of the population. A ruptured brain aneurysm can cause a type of stroke known as a subarachnoid hemorrhage, according to Mayo Clinic, which is what Emilia incurred.
How Long Has Emilia Clarke Been Sick?
While she had not spoken out on her health struggle until 2019 and, at that time, revealed the first aneurysm happened in 2011, Emilia also claimed she had possible signs of an issue as a teen. “When I was fourteen, I had a migraine that kept me in bed for a couple of days, and in drama school I’d collapse once in a while,” she told The New Yorker. “But it all seemed manageable, part of the stress of being an actor and of life in general. Now I think that I might have been experiencing warning signs of what was to come.”
How Is Emilia Clarke Doing Today?
Later, the actress would reveal just how lucky she was to survive the ordeal. “The amount of my brain that is no longer usable — it’s remarkable that I am able to speak, sometimes articulately, and live my life completely normally with absolutely no repercussions,” Clarke said in an the interview published by Metro. “I am in the really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that,” she added.
She also claimed she is completely recovered in her essay with The New Yorker. “In the years since my second surgery I have healed beyond my most unreasonable hopes, I am now at a hundred per cent.”
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