She was 24 and had just finished the first season of Game of Thrones.
Emilia Clarke was working out at a gym in February 2011 when an aneurysm ruptured inside her head. Doctors diagnosed her with a subarachnoid hemorrhage, a type of stroke that, according to her own account, kills about a third of patients immediately or soon afterward. She underwent surgery for three hours. When she woke up, a nurse asked her to say her name, but she couldn’t. She panicked. She clung to lines from the show to check that her memory was still there.
She spent another week in intensive care until the aphasia disappeared, and she left the hospital a month later. But the nightmare wasn’t over: she was told she had another, smaller aneurysm on the other side of her brain, and that it could burst at any moment. Years later, while performing on Broadway, a scan showed it had doubled in size. The second operation failed, and there was massive bleeding.
While the world saw her as Daenerys, she was fighting a battle that almost no one knew about. She told the story in The New Yorker in 2019.