Let’s start with Emilia Clarke’s new show, Ponies. It was an enormous hit with critics and viewers when it went out in America this year. It’s been described as the new Night Manager or the new Slow Horses or maybe the new The Americans, except it’s funny. The chemistry between Clarke and her co-star Haley Lu Richardson crackles off the screen and the result is like a screwball comedy where the heroes could be killed at any minute.
It’s set in 1977 in Moscow, where the wives of two US embassy staff discover that their husbands are CIA agents and have been killed in mysterious circumstances. Clarke’s character, Bea, is very much in love with her husband, Chris, and wants to find out the truth. Twila, played by Richardson, is less enamoured with her spouse but has no desire to return to her trailer park life.
Clarke and Hayley Lu Richardson in Ponies
They persuade the CIA to employ them. In Seventies espionage women are so rarely spies that they qualify as “persons of no interest”, or ponies — geddit? They are up to their necks in trouble from the start but somehow blag their way through.
Clarke is in love with the show. She found the scripts so easy to read and the show so obviously fun that she almost didn’t take the role because she was planning on a whole different next step in her career. “The plan was for incredibly important indie film-making that was hard, difficult and dark so I’d be taken seriously,” she says, sitting in her north London home and wearing a green Prada jumper and old Levi’s. “I got on the Zoom with the two writers and the main producer and, more than anything, I found I wanted to go for dinner and hang out with them. Damn it. Maybe I’m allowed to have a nice time.”
She came on board as an executive producer to get a little more control over the process. “I started out as a young woman when there wasn’t much work out there celebrating strong women, complicated women and bad women,” she says. “When I was cast in Game of Thrones people said, ‘Oh, it’s like Xena: Warrior Princess.’ I was like, sure, why not? It’s Xena but I’m naked a lot. There you go.”
The writers offered Clarke a choice of roles: the sassy, cocky Twila or the earnest, morally conflicted Bea. She toyed with Twila for about five minutes before realising she was obviously Bea. For Twila someone suggested Richardson, who had a breakthrough role in The White Lotus. “We had this two-hour Zoom together, I hung up and said, ‘She’s my baby sister,’” Clarke says gleefully. “We are very similar and completely different and I love her.”
Actors often say this, and often they’re not being truthful, but there are so many videos on YouTube of Clarke and Richardson cracking each other up that it’s clearly the case. They corpse so often that the crew aren’t always delighted. But given the 15 years Clarke’s had, you might think she deserves a good time.
She wanted to be an actress when she was three, which made her mother and father — a vice-president for a global consultancy and a theatre sound designer respectively — nervous. After drama school she spent a year working in temp jobs and waiting for a good role. Then Daenerys Targaryen, aka Khaleesi, Mother of Dragons, came along — the rightful winner of the game of thrones, whatever the scriptwriters say.
As Daenerys Targaryen in Game of ThronesKeith Bernstein/THA/Shutterstock
Thrones was an overnight hit but, as it took off, Clarke’s life headed in the opposite direction. After filming series one she was working out in a gym in Crouch End when she was hit by a headache so intense she ended up throwing up bile in the recovery position in the ladies’ changing rooms. At the Whittington Hospital an MRI found an aneurysm, an arterial rupture. Her chances of survival were put at 60 per cent.
The operation she underwent was minimally invasive but after surgery she struggled to remember her name and assumed her career was over. She clambered back and, even though the doctors told her she had another, smaller aneurysm on the other side of her brain that may pop at any moment, she went back to work.
Series two was a struggle — during press junkets she would sip on morphine in between journalists asking her about nude scenes. Then in 2013 she played Holly Golightly in a Broadway production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Her second aneurysm popped and she ended up in a Manhattan hospital with doctors cutting through her skull to stop the bleeding.
“I had these brain haemorrhages and I didn’t really do anything about them,” she says, giving a slight self-mocking shrug. “I just went back to work because I was alive and everything seemed fine.”
The first time I interviewed her was in 2015, at a time when she was recovering from the second operation and her beloved father had cancer. We met in a pub in Hampstead and she couldn’t have been more charming. She didn’t mention her struggles. Instead she was swearing like a trooper, telling ridiculous, self-deprecating stories. I’ve interviewed a lot of people but I still remember that one. That Emilia Clarke, I told my friends, she’s a hoot.
Clarke, left, as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’sAlamy
How she must have hated journalists probing her with insolent questions. She wasn’t sure if she was going to live and it seemed as if her dad was going to die. Reading that interview back today — it was for her role in Terminator Genisys — I wince at my questions about her splitting up with her boyfriend a few months earlier.
“I did go through a number of years where I wanted to shut my front door and sit in my nest,” she says. “I can’t begin to describe how young I was, how naive I was when I started. I had no understanding of the industry. And then I had this life-threatening brain injury and I was so unwell and I kept thinking I was going to die. And then my dad died and that was bigger than the brain haemorrhages.”
It still hurts. “This year is his ten-year anniversary and he was a…” she pauses, takes a breath and her eyes fill with tears. “Oh my God, I just can’t, it’s ten years and I still can’t talk about him without getting all emotional. He was a remarkable man and he taught me right from wrong in a fundamental, soul way. I’d give everything up for a hug from him. I just want that.
“It’s the weirdest thing with losing someone you love so much,” she says with a sad smile. “My relationship with him posthumously has changed. You need the distance and the finality of death to see them as a whole person.” She shakes her head briefly. “I wish I could talk to him now. Like, I get him at last. My dad was not religious but I feel very much that he is everywhere.”
Just as the first wave of grief was passing, Game of Thrones ended and she was at her last Emmys for the show, “going, ‘I can relax now…’ and suddenly realising everyone’s moved the f*** on. There were better shows on TV and I thought, I missed it. I didn’t pay attention.”
She took a deep breath, got ready to almost start again and then it was spring 2020. The world stood still and there was nothing she could do but sit alone in her flat with her dog and a head full of thoughts.
“While I remained healthy, I did not have a good time,” she says with a grimace. “I got through on Zoom therapy and drinking outside. Gin in a tin. Real healthy. One of my friends lives close by so every once in a while we would go to the canal with gin in a tin and our phone on speaker like 14-year-olds, listening to garage and drinking by the canal.”
Ponies is set in 1977 in MoscowDavid Lukacs/PEACOCK
She’s laughing as she recalls this, and it feels like maybe that was helpful, to shut down, think, talk and get drunk with her bubble of friends. “It was incredibly useful,” she says. “Maybe I am a born optimist but it was the first time that I’d stopped since I was 19. After drama school I did every hustle job out there from call centres to pulling pints at Meatloaf concerts. Then I was in Game of Thrones. I did not know that there was a word called ‘no’. I was doing films and plays and in the last four years of the show I had two weeks off.”
She smiles a lot now. Is she happy? “I’m just going to be wildly honest: it’s been years of me sitting with a lot of pain. Then I woke up one morning and realised I’ve got through the worst of it.”
That’s partly through ageing, she thinks. She’s 39 and “you go through certain universal moments, like I was 35 when I froze my eggs. A lot of other women around that age are freezing their eggs.” Which tempts me to ask about her love life but I remember quizzing her about her break-up last time and think better of it.
Somehow she remains cute and dorky. Richardson recalls being on set and mentioning that she really fancied two very particular salads from the upmarket American grocery chain Erewhon. The next day she found them made from scratch in her trailer. Clarke had seven hours to study her lines, get some sleep and get back to set, and she’d taken the time to buy the ingredients and make the salads. Actors don’t do that, I say, baffled.
“I love feeding people,” she says. “I go through life wanting to feel safe and happy. The way I do that is by trying to create an environment that feels good. People say your energy should be used for the work. But being in my trailer then walking onto set and demanding silence, that would make me feel so uncomfortable. I think maybe it’s the impostor syndrome. I really shouldn’t be here. I don’t deserve to be here.”
You have impostor syndrome? “Damn it, my jig is up,” she says with a grin, delighted. “I’ve had it my whole life. The brain haemorrhages and the death of my dad were deeply life-altering moments happening at the same time as abnormal highs. It leaves me in the middle going, f***, nothing’s real. Everything’s floating. If you look at the good thing, it’ll go away.”
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But, I say, you didn’t get a chance to look at the good thing when it was Game of Thrones and you were young and jetting around the world with the cast like the Beatles of 21st-century TV. Do you really want to miss it again?
“So… it’s brilliant,” she says cautiously. “But we are in a moment where there’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear, and that’s just in my career lifetime. If there’s one thing I know it’s that if you prepare for the worst, you haven’t done enough preparation. I’ll enjoy myself but I do want to be very careful. You never know when things are going to change.”
And off she goes to the next step in a glittering career, producing and acting and making everyone food so they all fall in love with her. She’ll never quite get the chance to realise that she’s Emilia Clarke, Mother of Dragons, and she could win this game if she really wanted, but it’s there for the taking and everyone is cheering her on.
All episodes of Ponies will be on Sky and the streaming service Now in the UK and Ireland from May 22