news culture A Game of Thrones actress turned down a role in this hit saga because of the BDSM scenes!
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There are roles that you don’t accept so easily, even knowing that the project will sell like hotcakes. Indeed, if the sexual scenes can sometimes shock the public, they can also dissuade certain actors and actresses from accepting a role, as was the case for this famous actress of Game of Thrones.
Summary
- A modest mother of dragons
- Tastes… very particular
A modest mother of dragons
From the beginning of the broadcast of Game Of Thrones, the series had somewhat shocked the public for its high number of sex scenes, for its violence, and sometimes for both at the same time. And if this kind of scenes had been able to disturb the spectators, it is also the case of the actors themselves, sometimes still young and inexperienced at the time of shooting them.
Emilia Clarke, who played the famous Daenerys Targaryen, was barely 23 years old when she agreed to play the Mother of Dragons. Game of Thrones was his first role then, and finding himself having to shoot sex scenes from the first season did not leave him unmoved. Faced with journalists from the Daily Mail, she confided in this experience:
I was terrified, I had never been on a film set before and suddenly I had to undress in front of all these people. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, what was expected of me, what they wanted, or even what I wanted. Regardless of whether there’s nudity or not, I spent the first season thinking I wasn’t worthy to demand anything. If it’s in the script, it’s necessary.
An extremely difficult situation that prompted the British actress to use her newfound notoriety to make things change. Thus, she was able to ask to reduce the number of nudity scenes concerning her in the last seasons of Game of Thrones, but also avoid a project that could have been even worse: the main role of the Fifty Shades of Gray saga.
Tastes… very particular
Before the role was accepted by Dakota Johnson, it is indeed Emilia Clarke who had been selected to interpret Anastasia Steele in the saga Fifty shades of Gray. As a reminder, this is the film adaptation of the novel of the same name recounting the adventures of a young girl and a wealthy businessman adept at BDSM. While the project was destined to be a smash hit (it ultimately grossed $1.3 billion at the box office) and was helmed by a director Emilia Clarke particularly liked, the British actress explains why she chose to pass:
I had done nudity before and was afraid of being labeled doing it again. Sam (Taylor-Johson, the director, editor’s note.) is a magician. I love her and I think her vision was beautiful but I couldn’t. With minimal scenes, I was already categorized so then a film where everything revolves around the subject, I could not
The experience of Game of Thrones was therefore enough for Emilia Clarke to know that she did not want to repeat it in another successful production, under penalty of becoming famous for only making films and series with strong sexual content. An understandable choice that she was not the only one to make, since the role of Christian Gray was originally supposed to go to Ryan Gosling.
