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Emilia Clarke may play one of the fiercest and most intense characters on television as Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones, but it took a bit of silliness to help her land the job.
While presenting Clarke with the Britannia Awards for British Artist of the Year on Friday night at the British Academy Britannia Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, GoT co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss recalled her auditions for the role.
Even after showing HBO executives the pilot for GoT, Clarke was asked to audition again for the president of the network.
The meeting took place in “HBO’s corporate theater, which was large, dimly lit and empty except for us two and the president of HBO,” Weiss said. “We were smiling. He wasn’t. It was quite possibly the least inviting audition environment we had ever witnessed.”
After Clarke’s initial reading, said president remained poker faced.
“Emilia asked if there was anything else she could do to lighten the mood and David asked, ‘Can you dance?’ And without missing a beat, Emilia did the robot,” Weiss said. “She did it with commitment and she did it well…and even the president had no choice but to smile. She got the job 10 seconds after she left the room and the two of us ran to tell her before she left the building because letting her get on an 11-hour flight home without knowing seemed like cruel and unusual punishment.”
In her acceptance speech, Clarke suggested that Weiss and Benioff “deserve their own bravery award for hiring someone whose biggest job up until then was catering parties dressed as a Snow White.”
#EmiliaClarke once played Snow White…sorta. pic.twitter.com/cPsWz9OyEx
— Marc Malkin (@marcmalkin) October 27, 2018
