Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Peacock’s Ponies.Emilia Clarke broke a rib in a surprising way while filming Ponies. Peacock’s eight-episode spy thriller features Clarke as Bea Grant, who becomes an undercover CIA operative with Twila Hasbeck (Haley Lu Richardson) in Moscow as they try to uncover the truth about their husbands’ deaths.
While speaking with TheWrap, Clarke reveals that during one day of shooting, she was filmed having sex with “Three men, in a number of hours. Just keep bringing it — I’m going to sit on this thing, you’re going to bring them in, we’re going to pretend to have sex. I broke a rib that day.”
Richardson confirms her co-star’s injury, noting that “She really did. She’s such a tiny little sensitive body, meant she broke a rib.” Clarke shares that her rib is now mostly healed and clarified that “It didn’t like, fully break, it just popped out a little bit.”
Along with Clarke and Richardson, the cast of Ponies includes Artjom Gilz as Andrei Vasiliev, Petro Ninovskyi as Sasha Shevchenko, and Louis Boyer as Bea’s husband, Chris Grant. Andrei is a high-ranking and ruthless member of the KGB who believes Bea is a schoolteacher from Belarus, and she seduces him as part of the CIA’s larger operation to acquire valuable intel.
Sasha, who is a lower-level member of the KGB, is a CIA asset providing them with technology and information. As Bea mourns her husband and fights to maintain her cover with Andrei, she finds herself falling for Sasha, as both of them take life-or-death risks for deeply personal reasons.
As she balances her feelings and these relationships, Bea ends up having sex with Andrei, during which she fantasizes about having sex with Chris and Andrei instead. This was likely the scene that was being filmed the day Clarke injured her rib.
Ponies season 2 is not confirmed yet, but if it does continue, Bea’s romantic and sexual journey is poised to become more complicated given some of the game-changing developments that occur in the season 1 finale.
Chances of being renewed are off to a promising start given that the series is an immediate streaming hit, with only the U.S. version of the popular reality show The Traitors ahead of it on the streamer’s charts as of this writing. Clarke’s new show has also been well-received with a 95% critics’ score and 80% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. In ScreenRant’s review of Ponies, Dani Kessel Odom writes that Peacock has “created a unique and utterly irresistible spy show.”
As an espionage thriller set during the Cold War, Ponies is undeniably different from Game of Thrones, the hit fantasy series where Clarke played her most-well known character, Daenerys Targaryen. The HBO show had a reputation for its sex and violence, yet it was in Ponies that she accidentally injured herself while filming a sex scene.
Release Date
January 15, 2026
Network
Peacock