Beloved British actor Emilia Clarke said she’s missing “quite a bit” of her brain after surviving two aneurysms.
Emilia Clarke opened up about her medical history in a recent interview with BBC’s Sunday Morning.
The actor suffered two brain aneurysms in 2011 and 2013 while filming the HBO hit show Game of Thrones.
A brain aneurysm is a bulge in a blood vessel in your brain and if it bursts, it can cause fatal and instant internal bleeding.
Clarke was lucky to survive both incidents but as she showed when opening up about the surgery she received from the ordeal, it hasn’t been without consequences.
The 35-year-old actor 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.
“I am in the really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that.”
The Me Before You star spoke about what it was like seeing a scan of her brain after the surgeries: “There’s quite a bit missing, which always makes me laugh.
“Because strokes, basically, as soon as any part of your brain doesn’t get blood for a second, it’s gone. And so the blood finds a different route to get around but then whatever bit it’s missing is therefore gone.”
Clarke is certainly on the better side of all of this as the actor described the pain she suffered as a result of the aneurysms as “excruciating” and the surgery as the most pain she’s ever been through.
When she was asked how she keeps going, aware of the state she’s in Clarke said: “I can do a two and a half hour play every single night and not forget a line.”
The star referred to her latest project, a theatre adaptation of The Seagull.
“I always had a good memory because, it’s the only thing, it’s the only skill as an actor, you just have to remember some lines, so your memory is obviously incredibly important and I consistently tested that but, I gave up wondering.”
“There’s no point in kind of continually wracking your brains as to what might not be there, because what you have now is great, so let’s work with that.”
The Daenerys Targaryen actor went on to describe how GOT saved her life throughout everything: “You go on the set and you play a badass character, and you walk through fire, and you speak to hundreds of people, and you’re being asked to be – to work as hard as you possibly can.
“And that became the thing that just saved me from considering my own mortality.”
Watch the full interview below.
