Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke details multiple near-death experiences in emotional speech

Actress Emilia Clarke has opened up about her harrowing health issues in an emotional acceptance speech.

As one of the featured Power of Women honourees at the Variety Power of Women event, Clarke took to the stage to deliver a speech about surviving two brain haemorrhages.

“I am personally here to talk about a shocking health inequality that affects millions of people yet remains largely invisible,” she began.

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In 2019, Clarke co-founded her charity Same You alongside her mum, Jennifer Clarke, with hopes of helping people access better neuro-rehabilitation care and mental health support.

Clarke herself has suffered two brain haemorrhages, the first in February 2011 when she collapsed during a workout shortly after filming wrapped on season one of Game of Thrones.

The second in 2013, when a brain scan revealed that a dormant aneurysm had doubled in size and ruptured, and she was rushed to emergency surgery.

Clarke shared that after her first haemorrhage occurred during her rise to fame on Game of Thrones, she didn’t want anyone to know about it.

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“I was ashamed and overwhelmed by a diagnosis I didn’t understand,” she said.

“We didn’t even tell HBO until we knew I wasn’t going to die, which in TV terms is usually when they kill you off.”

Reflecting on the experience 15 years after her first health scare, Clarke said she now has the hindsight to realise “how difficult that time truly was”.

“I never had the chance to reflect on what my two brain traumas had done to me because I could walk, talk, be myself, remember my lines, and was back on camera within weeks of both brain injuries.”

Clarke shared that she had ignored all the signs that something was wrong, chalking it up to “stress and my non-stop work schedule that I wasn’t too good at coping with.”

“I thought I had been fixed. So did my doctors. None of us could see the pattern, so I just blamed myself,” she said.

“It never occurred to me that maybe the problem wasn’t me, that it was because a brain injury is extraordinarily complex. And we’re still only beginning to understand the impact it can have long after you’ve supposedly recovered.”