Updated December 18, 2019 – Emilia Clarke said that she was pressured to do nude scenes for projects after she played the role of Daenerys Targaryen on “Game of Thrones”, where she frequently appeared nude.
Emilia, speaking in a recent ‘Armchair Expert’ podcast , said, “I’m a lot savvier with what I’m comfortable with, and what I am okay with doing, I’ve had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up,’ and they’re like, ‘You don’t wanna disappoint your ‘Game of Thrones’ fans.’ And I’m like, ‘F— you.’ I feel like I’ve seen enough now to know what is actually needed.”
Clarke revealed that she found nude scenes terrifying when role playing intimate sex scenes on the “Game of Thrones”, and remembered how her former co-star Jason Momoa acted as a mentor for her while filming the opening season of the HBO hit series. Emilia Clarke starred on “Game of Thrones” for 10 years,
Emilia said, “It’s only now that I realize how fortunate I was with that, because that could have gone many, many, many different ways. Because Jason had experience, he had done a bunch of stuff before coming on to this, he was like, ‘Sweetie, this is how it’s meant to be and this is how it’s not meant to be, and I’m going to make sure that’s the way it goes… He was so kind and considerate and cared about me as a human being. He took care of me, he really did. In an environment where I didn’t know I needed to be taken care of,” Emilia continued.
Continuing, Emilia said, “I’d come fresh from drama school, and I was like, ‘Approach this as a job.’ If it’s in the script then it’s clearly needed, this is what this is and I’m gonna make sense of it,” Emilia said, “I’m floating through this first season and I have no idea what I’m doing, I have no idea what any of this is. I’ve never been on a film set like this before, I’d been on a film set twice before then, and I’m now on a film set completely naked with all of these people, and I don’t know what I’m meant to do and I don’t know what’s expected of me.”
Emilia Clarke then described how she felt comfortable pushing back, requesting less nudity after playing the sexy Daenerys Targaryen on Season 1 of Game of Thrones, With Momoa’s guidance.
The #MeToo movement has opened our eyes to many of the methods powerful people in Hollywood take advantage of actors and actresses because of their status and influence. Many actors are pressured into showing their nude bodies.
Natalie Portman, Jennifer Lopez, Halle Berry, Salma Hayek, Sarah Jessica Parker, Debra Messing, Ciera Payton and many more actors have been pressured to take their clothes off to play a sex role on camera.
Actresses at every level in the movie industry are often pressured into performing nude scenes or playing a semi-nude movie role. The bottom line is, and what needs correcting in the industry, is that far too many stars decide to take their clothes off to play a nude or graphic sex role in a movie scene because they are really worried about the implications if they say “NO”, or simply because they felt intimidated to show their nude bodies.
Flight of Fury actress, Ciera Payton, in her first professional acting role said neither the film’s producers or her agent showed her the full script, which included a nude shower scene. She read the screenplay for the first time halfway through her flight that to Romania, where the movie was being filmed, and discovered she had to play in a scene where her character’s role comes out of the shower naked.
Confronting the lead actor, Steven Seagal, she told the Washington Post that she told Seagal she wasn’t comfortable performing the nude scenes. Payton said about that conversation, “He’s kind of sitting there, and he’s trying to think of what to say, and he goes, ‘You won’t even show your tits?”.
Seagal sent Payton outside to gather the other higher-ups people into his trailer, all of them were male. Then he called Payton back in to question her and said Payton, “somebody in the room is just like, ‘You know, we stuck our neck out to hire you for this’”.
Actress Alysia Reiner, star of “Orange Is the New Black” and “Better Things”, said early in her career was made to play a sex role that was even in the original movie’s script. Reiner said, “It feels surprisingly like high school, like peer pressure. Particularly as a young actor, there is this fear of, ‘I will get fired, and I need this job.’ There’s this feeling of being easily replaceable.”
Emilia Clarke, in her Armchair Expert podcast interview said that while she is now “a lot savvier” about indicating what she is and isn’t comfortable doing, Emilia said there was pressure to perform a certain way for fans, “I’ve had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up,’ and they’re like, ‘No, you don’t wanna disappoint your Game of Thrones fans.’ And I’m like, ‘Fuck you!'”, said Emilia.
You can listen to the Emilia Clarke Armchair Expert podcast here, or watch all of Emilia Clarke’s nude scenes here.
