Looking Back at Emilia Clarke’s candid confession about surviving two brain aneurysms

Emilia Clarke had a complete mental shutdown after suffering from multiple life threatening brain aneurysms and “convinced” herself that she was “meant to die”, which she talked about in 2019.

Emilia actually opened up during an interview with the How To Fail podcast, during her filming of HBO hit fantasy drama Game of Thrones.

The Me Before You actress had her surgery in 2011 and 2013 for aneurysms, which are “bulges or ballooning in the wall of a blood vessel” as per Mayo Clinic.

Experts think brain aneurysms form and grow because blood flowing through the blood vessel puts pressure on a weak area of the vessel wall. This can increase the size of the brain aneurysm. If the brain aneurysm leaks or ruptures, it causes bleeding in the brain, known as a hemorrhagic stroke.

The actor revealed that her first haemorrhage occurred at the time when she was filming the first season of the GOT series. She collapsed once when she was 24, in a gym in London. She mostly kept her battle period very secretive.


As reported by Fox News, Clarke said,"I was just convinced that I had cheated death, and I was meant to die”. "Every day, that's all I could think about”, she added.

Her health deteriorated so much that once she could remember crawling to the bathroom to vomit.

"In that moment, I knew I was being brain damaged," she recalled. After being paranoid about death, she became really “sensitive” to headaches, constantly becoming convinced that it was happening “again” as reported by Page Six.

Things got so ordeal for the actor that she couldn't help but think about death but went on to give an interview to MTV anyway.

Emilia’s first surgery was emergency, due to the immediate action necessary to have been taken to deal with the stroke that she went through during that time. But the second, was a failed one, which left her “bleeding heavily”.

“The doctors made it plain that my chances of surviving were precarious if they didn’t operate again,” she recalled in the poignant piece. “This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way, through my skull.”

Clarke, who has since launched a SameYou charity inspired by her journey, called her recovery “gruesome” and revealed “bits of her skull had been replaced by titanium.”

In 2022 she made headlines with her striking comment on her health to BBC. She said, “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,” during the 2022 sitdown.

While narrating her experience, Clarke mentioned that she was a really, really, small minority of people who can survive such frailties.