Emilia Clarke says she underwent two intensive brain surgeries during the early years of Game of Thrones, after a diagnosis that she described as quick, ominous and life-threatening. In a personal essay published in 2019, she said the first signs came while she was exercising with her trainer, when it felt as though an elastic band were squeezing her brain.

She said the pain left her physically sick and led to a diagnosis of a subarachnoid hemorrhage, caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain. Clarke said she had an aneurysm and an arterial rupture, and that urgent surgery was needed to seal off the aneurysm because there was a very high risk of a second, often fatal bleed. She was treated at a hospital in London.

The actress, who took over the role of Daenerys Targaryen from Tamzin Merchant after the botched original pilot and defined the part for a decade, said the scale of the danger was immediate. She wrote that about a third of subarachnoid hemorrhage patients die immediately or soon thereafter, and said she knew at some level what was happening because her brain was damaged. “I’d never experienced fear like that,” she wrote, calling it “a sense of doom closing in.”

That account matters because Clarke was describing the illness while still living through the demands of a global hit that made her one of television’s best-known faces. The essay also placed the crisis beside her work as an actor, saying she needed to remember her lines and could not do so after surgery. She wrote, “I am an actor; I need to remember my lines. Now I couldn’t recall my name.”

Clarke said the second surgery and recovery left her with temporary memory loss and aphasia. She said there was a point when she could see her life ahead and felt it was not worth living, a line that captures how severe the aftermath was even after the immediate threat had passed. The question now is not whether she survived the ordeal — she did — but how much of her public image was built on work she performed while carrying a hidden medical emergency.

Clarke’s essay also widened the frame around an actor whose career stretched beyond Westeros, across the big and small screen and onto Broadway and London’s West End. It also touched on mental health and sexual assault, but the central story remained the same: a decade-defining role was being carried by an actor who had already faced two brain operations, and who chose to say so only years later.

For Clarke, the answer to what happened is now plain. She survived a subarachnoid hemorrhage, endured two surgeries, lost her memory and speech temporarily, and returned to the work that made her famous.