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Game of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke delivered a deeply personal and emotionally charged speech at Variety's Power of Women London event this week, revealing how two brain hemorrhages in her twenties nearly destroyed not just her health but her confidence as a performer.
The 39-year-old told attendees that for years after surviving the bleeds, she carried a persistent and overwhelming sense that she had done something wrong simply by staying alive. "I truly felt like I had cheated death, and it was coming to get me," she said, before adding with characteristic dry wit that the experience also made her fear it had permanently damaged her ability to act, a concern she noted some observers might not disagree with.
Clarke suffered her first brain hemorrhage in 2011 at just 22 years old, the same year she was filming the debut season of Game of Thrones. Her second came at 24, shortly after making her Broadway debut. She joked that she would have liked to blame the second hemorrhage for the poor critical reception to that stage run, but conceded the bleed happened after the show had already closed.
What made recovery so difficult, Clarke explained, was that she appeared outwardly functional almost immediately, walking, talking, remembering her lines, and returning to set within weeks both times. That visible normality masked a far more complicated internal reality, one involving hormonal disruption, extreme fatigue, crippling anxiety, and physical pain that she spent years attributing to stress rather than to the lasting neurological impact of her injuries.
In 2019, Clarke went public with her story and co-founded the charity SameYou alongside her mother, with a mission to improve brain injury aftercare and rehabilitation for survivors worldwide. The response was immediate and overwhelming, drawing tens of thousands of young people who described feeling abandoned once the acute medical crisis had passed.
Clarke noted she has recently undergone her own belated recovery journey, working with specialist David Putrino at Mount Sinai in New York, and has finally reclaimed the energy and clarity she had before her bleeds.
