56 | Rolling Stone | RollingStoneAus.com September, 2017
PREVIOUS PAGE: PRODUCED BY COCO KNUDSON. SET DESIGNBY MICHAEL STURGEON. PANTS BY ALEXANDER WANG.WhenIfirstmetClarke,backin2013,
theactresswas26,stillrelativelyun-
knownwhennotwearinghersignature
GoTblonde wig, and not likely to compare
herself to her warrior-queen character.
She’dstillseemedslightlyinaweofthe
factthatshe’dgottenthejobatall,which
wasonlyherthirdactingroleever.“I’m all
too painfully aware of how quickly this can
disappear,” she’d told me when we’d met
ina Broadway dressing room, where she
wasrehearsingtoplayHollyGolightlyin
BreakfastatTiffany’s.
Fouryearslater,Clarkehasmaintained
herhallmarks–wryhumourandample
good will, among them – but it’s clear we’re
in another realm. Even in a messy bun and
frayed blue jeans, she now comes across as
asortofbeacon–poised,almostglowing,
a point to which all other attention can’t
helpbutbedrawn.Inotherwords,shehas
a way of commanding the room that seems
downright Khaleesi-esque. She has, after
all, now spent the bulk of her adult life em-
bodying one of our culture’s most striking
images of female domination, while elo-
quently explaining her onscreen nudity in
broadly feminist terms. She’s turned 30 (of
which she says, “I was just quietly panick-
ing”).She’sgracedthebigscreenmultiple
times, including opposite Arnold Schwar-
zenegger inTerminator Genisys.And,like
therestofus,she’slivedthroughBrexitand
theascendencyofTrump,or,assheputs
it, “’16.Thefuckingyearwhereeverything
shit happened.” So, times have changed –
forbetterandforworse.
“You can’t expect everyone to just stop
doing their jobs and march every day of
theirlives,”shesaysofthevolatilepolitical
climate. “But we’ve got to be in this shit for
thelonggame.”AndforClarke,being“in
thisshit”meansnotbeingOKwithalot
of what goes on around her – a realisation
thatgrewandamplified“ina[post-Brexit]
erawhereyousuddenlygo,‘Whatdoyou
mean my views are so vastly different from
my neighbour?’ ” Like, for example, her
viewsonbeingoneofthefewwomenon
anygivenset.Orthefactthatwomencon-
sistentlyhavefewerlinesthantheirmale
counterparts, even when they’re playing
the“lead”.Orthatactressesmustarrive
for hair and makeup hours before most of
themalestars.“Ifeelsonaiveforsayingit,
butit’slikedealingwithracism,”shesays.
“You’re aware of it, and you’re aware of it,
but one day, you go, ‘Oh, my God, it’s ev-
erywhere!’ Like you suddenly wake up to
it and you go, ‘Wait a fucking second, are
you... are you treating me different be-
cause I’ve got a pair of tits? Is that actually
happening?’ It took me a really long time
to see that I do get treated differently. But I
look around, and that’s my daily life.”
She recognises, of course, that this is
acomplicated stance to take as a woman
who has no doubt benefited hugely from
her,ahem,pairoftits.ShewasEsquire’s
SexiestWomanAlivein2015(“My mum
bribed them”),andherroleonGa me of
Throneshasbeenpunctuatedbymomen-
tous scenes in which she happened to be
naked. “Itdoesn’tstopmefrombeinga
feminist,” she counters. “Like, guess what?
Yes,I’vegotmascaraon,andIalsohavea
high IQ, so those two things can be one and
the same.”But the complexity of gaining
women’s-empowerment cred through such
channels explains why she’s also glad about
the evolution of her character, a woman
whoroseliterallyfromtheashesandnow
seemspoisedtowinthegameofthrones.
Throughouthistory,Clarkeremindsme,
“Women have been great rulers.And then
forthattobeacharacterthatI’mknownto
play? That’s so fucking lucky. Anyone who
seemstothinkthatit’snotneededneed
only look at the political environment we’re
alllivingintobelike,‘Oh,no,it’sneeded.
Itisneeded.’ ”ll of which means
that Clarke is now em-
bracing her charac-
ter’s power in a way that
might not have been pos-
sible for her when the se-
ries first aired, when the
dewofOxfordshirewasstillfreshupon
her. Clarke grew up about an hour outside
London in the tweedy
British countryside of
meat pies and bovine
creatures. “You k now, I
grew up with a stream
in the garden and with
fields everywhere,” she
says. “We used to go
mushroom-picking.
There were ducks. It
was idyllic on every
level.” She followed her
olderbrothertoSt.Ed-
ward’s, a private board-
ingschoolinOxford
where, as the daugh-
ter of a sound designer
(who’d s t a r t e d out a s a
roadie) and a market-
ingVP(who’dstarted
outatsecretarialcollege),shewassome-
what removed from the upper-crust kids
of her new milieu. “It was a fancy school,”
she says. “And we weren’t that fancy.” She
was also an artsy kid at a school that wasn’t
that artsy. “People were good at hockey and
wanted to be lawyers. I just wanted to be
everyone’s friend,” she says. “It was painful- I was on the outskirts, peeping in, going,
‘You guys look fun. Can I come join?’ ”
After graduation, she applied to R ADA,
LAMDA and Guildhall, a trifecta of hal-
lowed institutions for British would-be ac-
tors, and got rejected from every one. She
waitressed, saved up some money, went
backpacking around Southeast Asia and
India, and then reapplied to “a bajillion
schools”, only getting into the Drama Cen-
tre London “by the skin of my teeth when I
got a phone call saying, ‘This girl broke her
leg. The place is free if you want it.’ ”
Drama school was another venue where
shelearned her place. She was never the
favourite. She was never the ingénue. She
played old ladies and bedraggled prosti-
tutes. “They broke us down,” she tells me.
“Butif you’re a favourite at school, you’re
fucked for life. I mean, you come out and
you’re like, ‘Hey, where’s my golden egg?’
Whereaswhenyou haven’t had that at all,
you’re just like, ‘I will do anything. I will
work harder than you could imagine.’ ” She
gave herself a year to break into the in-
dustry. Right around that deadline, cash-
strapped, despairing and casting about for
alternative life plans, Clarke – just scrap-
ing five feet two, curvy and brunette – got
a call from her agents about auditioning
for the role of tall, willowy, blonde Daen-
erys Targaryen. She turned to Google for
a crash course on George R.R. Martin’s
novels and then went in to meet the HBO
execs. At some point in the audition, she
found herself doing the funky chicken.
She also managed to broadcast the range
HBO was seeking: Clarke had the vulner-
ability of someone who wasn’t the favourite
but also the strength of a young woman
who’d grown up with
a working mother who
had herself risen out
of secretarial school to
forge a high-powered
career. “I was so lucky
that I was brought up
with a mum who just
showed by example,”
Clarke says. “It was
never spelt out that I
would have a harder
time in life. My fam-
ily put a fair amount
of onus on wanting to
expand your thinking
as opposed to shrink-
ing your bottom.”
This goes a long way
toward explaining the
more personal reason why 2016 was a shitty
year for Clarke. On July 10th, her father –
whose behind-the-scenes work got her in-
terested in acting in the first place – passed
away from cancer. Clarke was filming a
movie in Kentucky and unable to be home
for all of his final days. When things got
dire, she wrapped the movie early but ar-
rived at the airport in London to learn that
she’d just missed him. “I definitely think
I’m still in varying degrees of shock,” she
says. “There’s no measure for it. There areContributing editor Alex Morris
wrote about Lorde in RS 788.
GAME OF
THRONES“You wake
up and go,
‘Wait a
second, are
you treating
me different
because I’ve
got a pair
of tits?’ ”