In praise of Emilia Clarke on Game of Thrones

After a controversial penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, one thing is clear – Emilia Clarke is the rightful queen of our hearts… and possibly Emmy season.

Take a deep breath. Imagine your favorite Daenerys scene from Game of Thrones. Hold it in your mind for a second, and appreciate all the intricacies, quirks of character, body language, and thoughtful line deliveries. Can you imagine anyone else other than Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen? Nope. Neither can I.

Over almost an entire decade, Clarke has brought Daenerys to life in her own way, always careful to strike a balance between benevolent ruler and furious hothead. As Daenerys, Clarke could believably turn on a dime, serene and sweet one second, and then flipping the rage switch in the next. In fact, some of the best moments in the series occurred when the Mother of Dragons deployed her furious anger with laser focus and precision in order to get what she wanted. (See: The murder of Kraznyz in Astapor, the burning of the Khals in the temple of Vaes Dothrak.)

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During these moments, we cheered for our Queen not only because her motivations were clear, but also because Emilia Clarke knows how to inhabit the character. She not only frequently emotes in Dothraki and Valyrian – basically nonsense languages – but she also knows that, at her very core, Daenerys is emotionally labile. Clarke has historically portrayed those shifts in emotion – however far away on the spectrum – as valid and organic, often allowing her facial expressions and subtle inflections in tone to telegraph the arrival of her fury, instead of reaching for the typical “angry” tools of raising her voice or wildly gesticulating.

Throughout the series, when Daenerys’s emotions got hot, Clarke went cold, portraying an icy exterior that attempted to hide the fires raging in her character’s mind. As a result, Daenerys’s often quiet rage reactions are almost more terrifying than someone actively lashing out in anger. Clarke manifests the queen’s temper by adopting a lowered voice – chock full of glorious vocal fry – and with a tightening of her facial muscles and stiffening of posture. Those things are capital C, Choices. And they’re fantastic. As Daenerys, Clarke often inhabits a woman doing her best not to fully break, because she knows that revealing her true inner thoughts at any given moment could ruin her plans entirely.

For years, the narrative supported Daenerys’s vacillation between righteous anger and carefully considered mercy by surrounding her with advisors who consistently worked to guide her to do the right thing. Because these people were often in agreement with her actions, we too went along for the ride. Conquering cities is messy, violent work, and Daenerys had her reasons.

But once the showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff surpassed the novels written by George R.R. Martin, Daenerys’s motivations became less nuanced and more clumsily overt. After the stunning Season 6 finale – just after which Daenerys had, indeed, raged against the machine by torching a fleet of slaver ships and executing two prominent leaders in Slaver’s Bay – things started to go south. Her intricate narrative went steadily downhill, plummeting faster than a headless Missandei off of the ramparts of King’s Landing. (Too soon? Sorry bbs.)

But guess who never wavered? Emilia Effing Clarke. That’s who. As her once rich and fascinating arc began to narrow into a predictable, one-dimensional line of blah, Clarke stayed the course with her Khaleesi, doing her best to salvage the complex heart of her character at every turn.

And then. Then the Mad Queen reared her ugly head, unnecessarily torching King’s Landing even after the people had surrendered. Many others have said much about the lazy writing, lack of character development, and overall rushed narrative that Weiss and Benioff insisted on pushing, so I won’t go into that here. Just know that these things could – and likely should – have thrown Clarke off when it came to enacting them on screen. She was asked to perform her own character assassination, but damned if she wasn’t going to go out in a blaze of glorious acting.

Remember when Daenerys was concerned about the innocents of the world? So much so that she hit pause on her own lifelong crusade to retake the Iron Throne and brought her armies and dragons north to fight for the living. Are we to believe that in the span of a few weeks she’s magically morphed into something entirely different?

Benioff and Weiss needed Daenerys to go “mad”, so they sent her into a state of hyper mourning and frustration, indiscriminately killing off her beloved advisors Jorah Mormont and Missandei of Naath, half of her armies, and one of her baby dragons. Yet, insanity isn’t grief over losing beloved friends, children, and lovers. No. It’s different. And it’s something that doesn’t happen within the span of a few days.

Whoops. I said I wasn’t going to go off on the Mad Queen stuff. Let’s get back to our lordess and savior, Emilia Clarke.

Looking back, it’s clear that Clarke wasn’t too psyched about where things were going for the woman she had spent so much time carefully constructing and portraying on screen. First, there’s this interview clip from 2018 that’s been pinging around the internet that seems to belie Clarke’s true feels about the final season. That adorbs grimace tells us A LOT. Oh, also, in an interview given with Vanity Fair, she said the ending, “f*cked me up.” To pour your heart and soul into a nuanced character for over a decade, only to be given a rushed, poorly conceived, misogyny-fueled denouement must be supremely disappointing.

I can’t even begin to imagine what reading those final scripts must have been like for Ms. Clarke. But she took lemons and made them into Lemonade. Yup, that lemonade with a capital ‘L’. I’m referencing the killer Beyonce album here, not the drink. Just like Queen Bey’s rage against her cheating ass husband fueled her creative passion and Daenerys’s rage fueled her conquest of Slavers Bay and the Seven Kingdoms, Clarke’s rage at being underwritten surely fueled her final scenes as Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons.

In the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, entitled “The Bells”, Tyrion Lannister, Daenerys’s sole remaining advisor, pleads with her to agree to end the siege if the commoners ring the bells within the city walls. They do, and Daenerys has a choice to make.

Here, Clarke only had seconds to believably sell a massive and unearned shift in perspective WITH NO DIALOGUE. As a performer, she also had to achieve this transformation with minimal environmental cues. While filming these scenes, she was on top of an glorified mechanical bull, swaying in the air above a soundstage wallpapered in nothing but greenscreen. (Check out this tweet for video.) There are no other actors for Clarke to play off of here. No lush scenery. No smells or sounds. There is nothing. But Clarke nails it anyway.

The entire back half of the episode depends on Clarke executing this moment perfectly. In a vacuum, the moment is a stellar piece of character work that would have been far more appreciated had it landed with the weight of much-needed character development behind it, but Clarke does what she can with what she’s given. The camera goes all portrait mode on her face, blurring out the destruction of the city that surrounds her, and focusing on the sounds of the city instead. As Daenerys waits for the bells to ring and the people to embrace her as their liberator, Clarke’s face undergoes multiple transformations. It morphs from a twisted form of relief, to growing frustration, to the pent-up rage reaction that she so carefully constructed over the past eight seasons. We can read her like a book. Her body tenses, her eyes widen, her upper lip curls, and off she goes.

The people did not embrace her. Here, in King’s Landing, there is only fear. So she responds in kind. And the one and only reason this makes sense because of Clarke’s dedication to the moment.

Unfortunately, poor writing – no matter how well-acted – often doesn’t translate into accolades. Clarke has three Emmy nominations thus far, and if Emmy voters are kind and understanding, she’ll perhaps nab another one during awards season next year.

Valar morghulis – all characters on Game of Thrones must die – but thanks to Emilia Clarke, Daenerys Targaryen might get to go out with at least some of her dignity in tact.

Game of Thrones airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.