Emilia Clarke details her first 'excruciating' brain aneurysm and reveals she hid it from HBO out of fear they'd fire her for being 'weak and broken' but lived in constant fear 'death was going to come and get me'

Emilia Clarke has opened up on her feelings of shame and that she was 'not meant to be here' after suffering two brain aneurysms in her 20s.

The actress, 39, nearly died twice from the potentially fatal condition, with the first haemorrhage happening right after she shot to global fame in the first season of Game Of Thrones.

However, the star - who played Daenerys Targaryen in the hit fantasy series - revealed she 'did not take care of myself at all', keeping her health issues a secret from HBO and returning to work to do promo for the show barely a month later.

Following her second brain haemorrhage, Emilia said she 'shut down emotionally' and lived in constant fear that death would catch up to her.

Laying bare her health condition and its aftereffects to Elizabeth Day on her How To Fail podcast, the Me Before You star recalled the moment she suffered her first aneurysm aged 24, whilst doing a plank at the gym in 2011.

'The night before I'd had this horrible headache and I just felt restless and anxious and stressed,' she explained. 'I remember it really clearly being like I don't feel good in my brain and body. Didn't think anything of it because I got headaches quite a lot.'

'And then I arrived at the gym and like we've all had those days where you're at the gym going, "I'd rather be anywhere else, this is really hard". And it felt particularly difficult but I was in a mode of beating myself up so you're like "Come on we're doing this we're going to do it".'

Emilia went on: 'So, I arrived incredibly tired and we were doing the plank and then the closest thing to describe it to imagine an elastic band just snapping around your brain, this insane pressure.

'And I stopped and he was like, "Where does it hurt?" And I said, "My head." And my trainer was like, "That's not good".'

Describing how she was throwing up while in intense agony, she recalled the moment she realised that something was seriously wrong and explained how she recited lines from Game Of Thrones to try and block out the pain.

'And then everything feels like a blur. I crawled to the loo and was just vomiting profusely with this unbearable headache', she said.

'And in that moment, I knew I was being brain damaged. Something clicked, someone somewhere had said, "If you're throwing up and you have a headache, that's bad. That's really bad."

'So, I started wiggling my fingers and toes and I started going through all the lines from the show and I just kept saying to myself, "I'm an actor." Because I'd just got my dream job. So, I just kept saying this kind of mantra over and over and over and over again.'

Emilia said she was drifting in and out of consciousness when luckily someone found her and called for an ambulance, while another person managed to call her mum.

But she said that when her parents arrived at the hospital they initially walked past her in the hallway, after not to recognising her while she was in 'excruciating amounts of pain'.

The Emmy nominated star said that at first the doctors had no clue what was wrong, believing her to be on drugs, until a nurse who was married to a brain surgeon recognised the symptoms.

Following her first brain aneurysm, Emilia suffered aphasia - the inability to understand or produce speech as a result of brain disease or damage - and temporarily lost her ability to recall her own name.

However, she said her entire preoccupation was on her job, with her focus being on getting back to work over her recovery, while she was desperate to keep what happened a secret from HBO out of fear her employers would 'see me as weak'.

'I spent the next two weeks with my agent trying to not tell HBO until they knew I wouldn't die,' she said. 'I was in A&E until they worked out what was wrong with me. 

'Then I went to a different hospital and I just kept trying to say like, "I've got to go to work. I can't be here. How long am I how long is this going to take?" And they're like, "You've got your brain is bleeding. It's going to take quite some time." 

Emilia was back on the promo trail mere weeks later and described feeling 'so ashamed' of what had happened to her that she kept it secret from everyone. 

She said: 'That took a long time for me to wrap my head around. But as soon as I left hospital, I had maybe a month and then I was doing press for the first season of Game of Thrones, still with a bit of morphine. 

'I was so ashamed that this thing had happened and that the people who had employed me might see me as weak or see me as something that could be broken. 

'It was so like, "I'm fine! I'm fine." And I was so young and it was so all-consuming that any repercussions of the injury I just absolutely ignored and tried my best to just like pretend like it didn't happen in order to get back to work. And then very quickly after that we were doing season two.'

She continued: 'I told David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss], the showrunners, because I felt it was like my duty to say I didn't die, so everything's fine, but just letting you know. And they were obviously very kind and lovely, but it was not something I told a single soul because I just didn't want anyone to know.'

However, two years later, the Star Wars actress had a second aneurysm after a surgical procedure went wrong.

She'd been having brain scans every six months to check on her second aneurysm, which had been discovered when she had the first but had been too small to operate on.

But, while in New York doing a show on Broadway and 'having the time of my life', medics discovered that it had doubled in size and needed surgery,

Despite promising her it would be a quick and simple operation and she'd be 'totally fine', Emilia described waking up in agony, with the doctors saying they needed to operate again to save her life.

'I remember counting down with the anesthetic and I just had a terrible feeling,' she said. 'And then the next thing I remember is them waking me up and having that pain all over again, because they were like, "It went wrong. We have to cut your head open and we have to have your permission".'

The operation had failed causing her to have a subarachnoid hemorrhage, with Emilia previously telling how she was in the 'really small minority' of people who have survived and been left with 'no repercussions'.

She shared: 'I have no memories of anything, I didn't have any spiritual awakening or anything. But my parents were waiting for me and the doctors would just come down every half an hour going, "We think she's going to die. No, we think she's blind. No, we think she's going to be paralyzed." 

'Every half an hour, they're just trying to work out what parts of my brain were going and how they were trying to save me. And my mum says that she felt a bright light and she knew that everything was going to be okay and then they came down and said "She's fine".' 

Detailing the aftereffects of the second brain haemorrhage, she described being on a great deal of opioids and having to relearn speech and movement, admitting at one point she feared her ability to act was gone.

But she went on: 'The biggest thing that happened to me with the second brain hemorrhage was I shut down emotionally. And it became this thing where I just couldn't look anyone in the eye.'

Emilia explained how all she could think about was that she was 'meant to die' and lived in constant fear that she would have another aneurysm.

'What happened after the first and specifically after the second, I was just convinced that I had cheated death and I was meant to die, and that every day that was I should be that's all I could think about,' she said.

'So it was the opposite of like "I survived, I feel great!"  It was this like "I'm not meant to be here. This is going to come and get me." 

'And that like just cuts you off from being able to engage with the outside world, because you're walking around knowing that your body has failed you - your brain has failed you. 

'This thing that you know to be where your perception of yourself lies has failed you. And no one else can see it. So you become very sensitive.'

Once again, Emilia was back at work promoting Game Of Thrones just six weeks later, but said that it had been 'helpful' to have something to focus on, adding: 'Without my work, I don't know what I would have done.'

But she confessed that she didn't look after herself, instead berating herself as a failure and trying to pretend to be okay to convince the show's bosses not to fire her.

'I did not take care of myself,' she admitted. 'I did not give myself any grace. I did not give myself any encouragement or glean any courage from it.  I didn't give myself any kindness.

'Everything was like "You failed!" I remember calling David and Dan after the second one and being like "Lol it happened again! Don't worry though, don't write me out of the show. I'm going to be fine".

'And they were sweet and lovely and kind and obviously like "Oh my God are you okay?", but in my mind I'm like "That means that you don't think I can do my job".'

She described being at San Diego Comic-Con the month after her near-death ordeal when she was hit by another headache and immediately thought the worst, but explained her upbringing had cemented in her a need to push on no matter what.

'I started getting a headache and anytime I got any kind of headache, I was like, "That's it. It's happening. It's happening again,"' she said.

'My publicist was like, "Right, we got to go do this live interview with MTV." And I was like, "I think I'm going to die. I think I think it's happening." And in my head, I was like, "If I'm going to die, I'll do it on live TV." Like, let's go. There is no other option. 

'I was blessed that after each of my brain injuries in my mind there was no other option but to carry on. I was raised by a family that did not partake in pity. Self-pity was not on the table. It's not how we operated. 

'And one of the deepest cuts of having the second brain hemorrhage was that I was like, "That's not very fair. Why did I have to have another one?" And that thought felt like going backwards.'

Fortunately, Emilia said that omnipresent fear she held that she would have another aneurysm was finally gone, explaining: 'One morning you wake up and you're like, "Oh, haven't had that thought in a while." 

'Whereas before, I would say to my hair and makeup team on whatever job I was on, "I'm going to think I'm having a brain hemorrhage quite a lot. I'm not!" 

'And then a couple of years after I just realized that I wasn't thinking about that anymore. I get my brain checked all the time and it's completely fine. But there were other things that I now know I've lived with that are the result of a brain injury that only this year I have properly fixed.'

In 2019, Emilia and her mum Jenny co-founded SameYou, which helps raise money for people recovering from brain injuries and strokes.

She founded the charity after she was shocked to find out how understaffed rehabilitation services were and both mother and daughter were both made MBEs in 2024 for their inspirational work.

At the time, Emilia said it was 'life-enhancing and magical' to see her mother, who has also had surgery to remove a brain aneurysm, recognised for her charity work alongside her.

She said: 'It's such an incredible honour, such an incredible privilege, and the most important thing for us is that it's for everybody with brain injury.

'To have this near-death experience and to have gone through the sort of the darkness of it all, and then come out of it, we're so lucky.'