#EmiliaClarke woke up the morning after the 2019 Emmy Awards with a goal: to redefine what she saw as success.
By any measure, Clarke was already wildly successful. As well as starring in big-budget
#Terminator and
#StarWars spinoffs, she was the de facto queen of premium drama, thanks to her portrayal of warrior princess Daenerys Targaryen in HBO’s blockbuster fantasy series
#GameOfThrones. But the movies — 2015’s “Terminator Genisys” and 2018’s “Solo: A Star Wars Movie” —underperformed. Then, in May 2019, “Game of Thrones” came to an abrupt and almost universally hated end.
“I have gone through every circuitous route to get to the place that I am now, which is finally being able to be very grateful for everything that ‘Game of Thrones’ did and has given me. I no longer feel trapped in it, or trapped in the result of being in it,” she says thoughtfully. “I feel just really lucky that it happened to me — even luckier that I’ve had time to understand what that was, and now I feel firm...