Emilia Clarke has spoken out about the pressure she has faced regarding performing nude scenes - revealing she was told during an unnamed project that she didn't want to 'disappoint her Game of Thrones fans'.

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Clarke, who portrayed Daenerys Targaryen throughout the show’s eight seasons, was speaking on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast when she admitted she struggled with the gratuitous nudity towards the start of the show’s run.

The Last Christmas star admitted to crying before some of the scenes, which she described as “terrifying”.

She said, “I'd come fresh from drama school and I approached it as a job.

"[I thought] if it's in the script then it's clearly needed, this is what this is and I'm going to make sense of it. Everything's going to be cool.

“I’d been on a film set twice before then, and I’m now on a film set completely naked with all of these people, and [I thought] I don’t know what I’m meant to do, and I don’t know what’s expected of me.”

Clarke added that she’s since had disagreements on set regarding nudity, saying she was once told that she'd 'disappoint her Game of Thrones fans' if she didn't film a specific sequence.

“I had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up,’ and they’re like, ‘You don’t wanna disappoint your Game of Thrones fans. And I’m like, ‘F**k you'. ”

However Clarke said that Game of Thrones co-star Jason Momoa, who played her husband Khal Drogo at the beginning of the show, helped her to set boundaries around what was acceptable.

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“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'."

Authors

Patrick Cremona, RadioTimes.com's senior film writer looking at the camera and smiling
Patrick CremonaSenior Film Writer

Patrick Cremona is the Senior Film Writer at Radio Times, and looks after all the latest film releases both in cinemas and on streaming. He has been with the website since October 2019, and in that time has interviewed a host of big name stars and reviewed a diverse range of movies.

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