Emilia Clarke: ‘I Was Convinced I Was Meant to Die’

Emilia Clarke has never shied away from talking about what she survived. But on the latest episode of Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail podcast, the Game of Thrones actress went somewhere deeper — into the dark psychological aftermath that followed not just one, but two life-threatening brain aneurysms.

“When you have a brain injury, you move around in the world, and for me, 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’s all I could think about,” Clarke said.

Clarke, now 39, suffered her first aneurysm in 2011 — shortly after wrapping the first season of Game of Thrones, during a workout at a London gym, at the exact moment her life was just beginning to explode. The second came in 2013 and required another surgery, this one far more precarious. As she described in her landmark 2019 New Yorker essay, “A Battle for My Life,” the second surgery initially failed, leading to a massive bleed. “The doctors made it plain that my chances of surviving were precarious if they didn’t operate again,” she wrote at the time. “This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way — through my skull.”

Parts of her skull were replaced with titanium. She called the recovery “gruesome.”

The Emotional Shutdown Nobody Could See

What Clarke described on the podcast wasn’t just physical survival — it was the invisible weight of carrying that experience while the world kept moving around her. After the second aneurysm, she said she had the “opposite” of the relief she’d felt after the first. Instead of feeling like she’d made it, she shut down.

“It became this thing where I just couldn’t look anyone in the eye,” she recalled. “It just cuts you off from 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.”

Headaches became a source of constant dread. She grew “really sensitive” to any pain in her head, convinced each one meant it was “happening again.” There was a moment she told her publicist she thought she was going to die — and then walked into an MTV interview anyway. “There was no other option but to carry on,” she said. “I was raised by a family that did not partake in self-pity.”

Memory loss was among the hardest parts. At one point after surgery, she briefly couldn’t remember her own name — something she’s previously described as terrifying. In a 2022 appearance on BBC One’s Sunday Morning, she told viewers that “quite a bit” of her brain is simply gone. “The amount of my brain that is no longer usable — it’s remarkable that I am able to speak, sometimes articulately, and live my life completely normally with absolutely no repercussions,” she said then, describing herself as being in the “really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that.”

Looking back now, Clarke is clear-eyed about what she got wrong in those years. She did “not take care of” herself, she said, and didn’t give herself the grace she needed to actually heal.

New Diagnoses, Finally Addressed

Perhaps the most striking revelation from the podcast wasn’t about the aneurysms themselves — it was what came after. Clarke disclosed that she has been diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS), two conditions she now understands are connected to the brain injuries she sustained. She didn’t say exactly when she received those diagnoses, but she was candid about how long they went unaddressed.

“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 as the result of a brain injury that only this year have I properly fixed, which is crazy,” she said.

Years of carrying something that had a name — and a treatment — without knowing it.

Since going public with her story in 2019, Clarke has channeled that experience into SameYou, the charity she founded to support young adults recovering from brain injuries and strokes. It’s become one of the most personal projects of her career — a way of making sure other people get the care and the grace she didn’t give herself.

“I’m in the really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that,” she’s said. She knows it. And she’s still figuring out what to do with that.