Game of Thrones was a pop culture phenomenon that took over television back in its day, so it’s only fitting that a growing number of former Thrones stars have since joined the MCU as another pop culture juggernaut. Emilia Clarke, whose breakout role was as Daenerys Targaryen in the HBO series, can now be found with a Disney+ subscription as part of the cast of Marvel’s Secret Invasion. While promoting the new series, the actress shared a funny story about when Game of Thrones became more like Marvel, and how she and co-star Peter Dinklage reacted.
Security skyrocketed in the later seasons of Game of Thrones, when millions of people were dying to know over hiatus what would happen next for Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys, Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion, and the rest of the characters. So, dealing with secrecy for Secret Invasion plot details wasn’t entirely new to Clarke, and it’s apparently easier nowadays than during Game of Thrones. The actress told EW:
I'll tell you what, it's so much easier now because whenever it comes up or people want to ask, you just get to be like, 'Dude, Marvel. I can't say anything.'
Marvel is of course notorious for the practices that prevent spoilers from getting out, ranging from heavily redacting scripts to preventing Spider-Man star Tom Holland from reading full scripts, to the point that Guardians of the Galaxy’s Zoe Saldana said that it “feels like a cult.” For Emilia Clarke, however, it’s much easier to fend off people asking for Marvel spoilers than it was for Game of Thrones back in the day. The actress went on to share a certain move by the GOT showrunners that particularly affected Peter Dinklage:
When we were doing Game of Thrones, when it started to get to the later seasons, some massive security changes happened. I was chatting with [showrunners] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] and they were like, 'Marvel. We're just learning from Marvel. Whatever Marvel's doing, we just want to do that.' So that became, you don't print anything — and then there was like me and Peter Dinklage being like, 'I need it on paper! I can't learn my lines without it being on paper!'
Apparently, both Emilia Clarke and Peter Dinklage are actors who prefer paper scripts over reading on a screen! David Benioff and Dan Weiss, who Clarke previously joked about not letting her slouch as Khaleesi on Game of Thrones, evidently went full Marvel to try and keep secrets later in the show’s run.
Her comments back up what Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, a.k.a. Jaime Lannister himself, revealed about the final season. He shared that not only did the cast receive their scripts digitally, but those scenes vanished Mission: Impossible-style once they were finished filming! The showrunners’ efforts were sometimes thwarted, including that time when a Ferris wheel spoiled their secrecy plans.
Of course, it’s hard to blame anybody at Game of Thrones or HBO for being concerned about spoilers in light of security leaks. Four episodes from Season 5 were leaked early (with one cast member claiming that HBO did so deliberately), and Season 6 dealt with another leak. Multiple episodes of the eighth and final season hit the web before they aired on HBO, although that didn’t stop the show from hitting history-making ratings before the end.
As recently as October 2022, the Season 1 finale of House of the Dragon leaked, so maybe the Game of Thrones spinoff will go into Marvel security mode as well! If so, Emilia Clarke presumably won’t have to deal with any of the measures, as the show is set centuries before her Game of Thrones character was born, and the actress herself isn’t watching HOTD.
If you want to revisit Emilia Clarke’s time as Daenerys Targaryen, you can find all eight seasons of Game of Thrones streaming with a Max subscription.
