For the last decade or so, Emilia Clarke has been living in recovery mode.
It began in 2011. At the time, Clarke was only in her early 20s, when her head started to ache. Soon the pain was unbearable and after being hospitalised, she was diagnosed with a subarachnoid hemorrhage – a type of stroke known to kill one in three patients.
Her rise to stardom was, theoretically, only just beginning. Clarke had just wrapped up filming the first season of HBO's Game of Thrones, starring as Daenerys Targaryen when her brain essentially "died" on her.
Watch a snippet of her interview on BBC One's Sunday Morning. Post continues after video.
“Somehow, almost crawling, I made it to the locker room. I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill. Meanwhile, the pain – shooting, stabbing, constricting pain – was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged," she wrote in a personal essay for the New Yorker in 2019.
At the time, she was determined not to lose her ability to memorise, telling BBC One's Sunday Morning that she kept "asking myself all these questions" and "hilariously kept saying lines from the show [Game of Thrones] in my head, because I knew... that if you're throwing up and you have a headache, that it's not good for your brain."