Emilia Clarke Was Told She’d ‘Disappoint’ Her Fans If She Didn’t Go Nude for a Project

Julyssa Lopez

In a new episode of Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert podcast, Emilia Clarke reveals she was told she'd "disappoint" her Game of Thrones fans if she didn't go nude on another project.

The actor started the interview with Shepard by talking about those initial nude scenes on GoT. (She played Daenerys on the hit HBO series for eight seasons.) “I’d come fresh from drama school, and I was like, ‘Approach this as a job.’ If [nudity's] in the script, then it’s clearly needed. This is what this is and I’m gonna make sense of it,” she said, according to Us Weekly. “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.”

<cite class="credit">HBO</cite>
HBO

Eventually Clarke started pushing back on the scenes—and she had the support of her costar Jason Momoa. “He was like, ‘No sweetie, this isn’t okay,'” Clarke recalled on the podcast.

Now, Emilia Clarke says things are different. Spending eight years playing the Mother of Dragons taught her to speak up when she's uncomfortable. During the chat with Shepard, she gave an example of a time she was asked to go nude for a project—and that she'd be "disappointing" her GoT fans if she didn't do it.

"Now things are very, very, very different, and I’m a lot more savvy about what I’m comfortable with and what I’m okay with doing,” she said. “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–k you’…. I feel like I’ve seen enough now to know what is actually needed. I was also, little did I know, protected by the show in terms of the storytelling being at a very high level and people they were hiring being at a very high level.”

Originally Appeared on Glamour