Emilia Clarke: ‘I ain’t got me no celebrity friends…there’s not a lot of actors I relate to’
May 28, 2018
Emilia Clarke covers the latest issue of Vanity Fair, and the changes with VF’s banner and cover fonts are going to take some getting used to, correct? Yikes! Emilia is promoting Solo: A Star Wars Story, plus she’s doing some advanced teaser promotion for the final episodes of Game of Thrones. Obviously, I went into this thinking I would find the GoT stuff more interesting, but she honestly doesn’t reveal much of anything there. But she does say some really interesting stuff about all of the production drama on Solo, what with the original directors being fired mid-stream and Ron Howard being pulled in quickly. You can read the full Vanity Fair profile here. Some highlights:
She’s already shot Daenerys’s final scenes: “It f–ked me up. Knowing that is going to be a lasting flavor in someone’s mouth of what Daenerys is . . .”
The loneliness of being a working actor: “This job can be so alienating. You’re in a trailer by yourself. You’re in a car by yourself. You’re in a plane. You’re in a plane. You’re in a plane. That’s what success looks like if you’re an actor. Success looks like being alone.”
She’s sworn off dating actors, and doesn’t want her love life to be in the news: “The guys that I’ve met in my life that are d-cks, I voluntarily walk the f–k away from them. That’s just bad taste. People shouldn’t know about those choices.”
Her squad is full of real girls: “I ain’t got me no celebrity friends. My squad? They don’t let me get away with anything. There’s not a lot of actors I relate to.”
Her role of Qi’ra in Solo: “We’re going to hit you with a character that could very easily well be a dude, because you question her motives. That’s really f–king exciting in the Star Wars universe, because that has never happened.”
She had problems with the original directors: “I’m not gonna lie. I struggled with Qi’ra quite a lot. I was like: ‘Y’all need to stop telling me that she’s “film noir,” because that ain’t a note.’ ” Frustrated by the lack of direction, she turned to Solo’s father-and-son screenwriters, Lawrence and Jon Kasdan, for support.
She says Ron Howard saved the movie: “All hail to [Lucasfilm president] Kathy [Kennedy] for hiring Ron…. When it comes to that amount of money, you’re almost waiting for [a huge disaster] to happen. Money f–ks us all up, doesn’t it? There’s so much pressure. Han Solo is a really beloved character. This is a really important movie for the franchise as a whole. It’s a sh-t ton of money. A sh-t ton of people. A sh-t ton of expectations.”
She does worry about bad reviews: “I hope we did it good, then, because people have all this gossip. I don’t want people to go, ‘That’s the bit where it all went wrong. That’s the bit, I know it.’ I just really hope that people have a good time, that it’s good, and, you know, selfishly, that I’m not sh-tt and that people don’t write reviews going, ‘Oh my God, that’s, like, the worst acting I’ve ever seen in my life. Wow. How did they give her the part?’ ”
As of 2014, she’s paid the same as Kit Harington, Lena Headey, Peter Dinklage and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau: They reportedly each landed $300,000 per episode, a dazzling figure that skyrocketed to half a million per episode for the final two seasons. “I get f–king paid the same as my guy friends. We made sure of that.”
I forgot to mention how much she curses in this interviews. She curses a lot, and very little of it sounds natural. Most of it sounds like a posh girl trying to sound “tough” and “street.” I don’t know, but after I read the whole piece, I came away thinking that she seems very “affected.” Her aim is to sound “real” and like she’s just a normal person who just happens to be part of two of the most famous franchises in history. Oh, and I do think her concern about bad reviews is justified: I love her as Dany, but at times I agree with the criticism that she’s not really all that and a bag of chips as an actress. On the plus side, the Star Wars movies aren’t known for being showcases for actors, so we’ll see.
Photos courtesy of Vanity Fair.