“I Just Cried With Fear” — The Untold Story Of How EMILIA CLARKE Almost Turned Down DAENERYS TARGARYEN And The GAME OF THRONES Role That Changed Everything
There is one detail buried inside EMILIA CLARKE’s Variety cover story this week that has barely been picked up by anyone — and it might be the most fascinating origin story in all of GAME OF THRONES history.
Because the woman who became DAENERYS TARGARYEN — the Breaker of Chains, the Mother of Dragons, one of the most iconic characters in television history — almost didn’t take the role at all.
Not because she didn’t want it. But because she was terrified.
“Gobbledygook”
When her agent first called her about GAME OF THRONES, Emilia Clarke had never heard of the books. She picked up the phone and her agent said: “You ever audition for Game of Thrones?” Her response: “You’ve just said gobbledygook. I have no idea what we’re talking about.”
She was a fresh drama school graduate. Unknown. Scraping together enough work to pay rent in London. And now someone was asking her to audition for a massive HBO fantasy series based on a beloved book series she’d never read.
She said yes to the audition — because what else do you do when you’re a broke drama student and HBO comes calling? — and then she went home and read the scripts.
“I Just Cried With Fear”
Her reaction to reading the DAENERYS scenes for the first time? “I just cried with fear.”
Not excitement. Not ambition. Fear.
Think about that for a moment. The woman who would go on to deliver some of the most commanding, fearless performances in television history — who would stand in front of thousands of extras and deliver speeches in a fictional language with complete conviction — sat alone in her flat reading those pages and wept because the role scared her that much.
A young woman who had to be commanded by dragons. Who had to project authority she hadn’t yet earned in her own life. Who had to carry an entire narrative arc across eight seasons and make audiences believe in every step of it.
She was 22 years old.
The Audition Nobody Knew About
What happened next is the kind of Hollywood story that sounds made up but isn’t.
At the Variety Power of Women event in London this week, Emilia opened up about those early GOT days in a way she rarely has before. She was 23 when filming began — barely out of drama school — and she admitted that DAENERYS was asking her to “step up” in ways she genuinely wasn’t sure she could deliver. Her strategy? The classic: fake it until you make it. Show up every day and pretend to be the woman the script said she was, until one day, she actually was.
That strategy — showing up, borrowing the character’s strength until it became her own — is the same one that would carry her through two brain emergencies, four Emmy losses, multiple franchise misfires, and back to a stage in London this week where Variety called her one of the most powerful women in entertainment.
What This Means In 2026
The full circle is almost impossible to overstate.
The girl who wept over those scripts is now 39. She has a jazz film premiering at Tribeca. She has a crime series coming to Prime Video. She has a charity that has helped tens of thousands of survivors. She has a speech at Power of Women that had an entire room in tears.
And somewhere, there are those original scripts — the ones that made her cry with fear — that started everything.
She said it herself this week, with the particular clarity that only comes from fifteen years of distance: “Recovery is as important as survival.”
She was talking about her health. But she could have been talking about everything.
The woman who cried reading those pages became Daenerys.
And Daenerys became her. 🐉
