is revealing how she felt when she experienced two brain injuries during her time on . The Daenerys Targaryen actress in February 2011, around the time the first season of the HBO fantasy drama premiered. She had another brain bleed in 2013.
“When you have a brain injury, because it alters your sense of self on such a dramatic level, all of the insecurities you have going into the workplace quadruple overnight,” Clarke, 37, said in an interview with published on Monday, June 10. “The first fear we all had was: ‘Oh my God, am I going to get fired? Am I going to get fired because they think I’m not capable of completing the job?’” According to the , both hemorrhages occurred between seasons so the actress only told a few people she worked with about her condition. However, after returning to set just weeks after her first brain bleed, Clarke worried she might experience another brain bleed due to the stress and pressure of working on such a large production.
“Well, if I’m going to die, I better die on live TV,” she recalled thinking at the time. Clarke first opened up about her brain injuries in an essay for in March 2019, just before the final season of Game of Thrones premiered. “The diagnosis was quick and ominous: a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a life-threatening type of stroke, caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain.
I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture,” she wrote of her first aneurysm in February 2011. “As I later learne.
