Emilia Clarke was afraid of getting fired from Game of Thrones while suffering from brain hemorrhage

Emilia Clarke, star of Game of Thrones, is among the bravest and most committed actresses in the movie business. Despite having two potentially fatal brain aneurysms while filming Game of Thrones, she continued. She continued despite the extreme heat and the lengthy workdays. All because she was more afraid of letting the showrunners down than dying.

Emilia Clarke was suffering from subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH)

After filming the first season of Game of Thrones, Clarke was hit with her first case of SAH. She told Harper’s Bazaar in a recent interview, “I wasn’t afraid of dying, I was afraid of being fired! I decided: ‘This is not something that’s going to define me’. I never gave into any feeling of ‘Why me? This sucks’. I was just like – gotta get back on it.”

Emilia Clarke for Harper’s Bazaar shoot

Emilia Clarke wanted to “pull the plug” after her second hemorrhage

The second hemorrhage was even more devastating for her. She recalled, “In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug, I asked the medical staff to let me die. My job – my entire dream of what life would be – centered on language, on communication. Without it, I was lost.”

“If I’m being brutally honest, the whole thing made me feel very ashamed,” she says, “like I was broken. As though the producers must think I’m an unreliable person that they’ve hired.”

Read Next: Emilia Clarke recalls when fans shipped Jon and Daenerys “a bit too much”