Actress Emila Clarke, who played Daenerys Targaryen in the HBO smash hit “Game of Thrones,” claims that her nudity on the show has led people to pressure her into performing nude scenes.
Speaking on the podcast “Armchair Expert,” hosted by actor Dax Shepard, Clarke said that she stopped looking at the internet during season one, since she would often encounter crude comments about her body.
“I learned it very early and I don’t look at anything at all ever, ever, ever, because when I did, after season one, I just saw articles about like how fat my a** was,” said Clarke, as reported by Fox News. “I was like: I’m a kid, man. Cut me some god**** slack.”
While Clarke never described her character’s nudity in the show as unnecessary, she did say that she is now pressured on sets to reveal her body more.
“Now things are very, very, very different and I’m a lot more savvy with what I’m comfortable with and what I am OK with doing,” Clarke said. “I’ve had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up,’ and they’re like, ‘You don’t want to disappoint your ‘Game of Thrones’ fans.’ And I’m like, ‘F*** you.’”
Clarke credited actor Jason Momoa for taking care of her on set, saying he treated her like a human being. At one point, he demanded that somebody get her a robe after noticing her shivering in the cold.
“It was definitely hard,” she said. “Which is why the scenes, when I got to do [them] with Jason, were wonderful, because he was like, ‘No, sweetie, this isn’t OK.’ He was so kind and considerate and cared about me as a human being.”
As noted by Covenant Eyes, Emilia Clarke has expressed dismay over her nude scenes on “Game of Thrones” in the past and even refused to do any more topless shots, at one point.
“Emilia, who plays the exiled princess Daenerys Targaryen, refused to appear in any more topless shots in the drama two years ago, according to her co-star Oona Chaplin, who disclosed that Emilia had told program bosses she ‘wanted to be known for my acting, not my breasts,'” wrote The Daily Mail in the wake of her being selected by as Esquire Magazine’s 2015 “Sexiest Woman Alive”
Similarly, actress Scarlett Johansson recently expressed regret over her “hyper-sexualized” image during the early stages of her career.
“It’s so different now, the climate is so different now,” Johansson said in a recent roundtable. “I feel when I was working in my early 20s and even in my late teens/early 20s, I felt that I sort of got, somehow, typecast. I was very hyper-sexualized,” she continued. “Which was, I guess, at the time, seemed OK to everyone. It was another time. Even though it wasn’t a part of my own narrative, it was, kind of, crafted for me by probably a bunch of dudes in the industry. And I guess that worked then, but it was really difficult for me to try to figure out how to get out of being an ingenue or the other woman because it was never anything that I had intended.”