Emilia Clarke went through the wringer during her eight seasons of Game of Thrones, with trials ranging from multiple brain aneurysms early on to getting used to doing so many nude scenes (with some help from Jason Momoa) to discovering that she should never Google herself. Now, nearly seven years after the series finale, she has opened up about something that really "pissed" her off about speaking Dothraki.
As fans may recall, Game of Thrones recruited a linguist to create Dothraki and High Valyrian as real languages that could be spoken on the show, and Emilia Clarke was the cast member who most frequently ended up speaking languages other than the Westerosi Common Tongue (a.k.a. English).
Ahead of the premiere of her new show in the 2026 TV schedule (which will be available streaming with a Peacock subscription), the Ponies actress spoke on Late Night with Seth Meyers about learning that she was considered bad at speaking Dothraki:
I put so much energy into learning Dothraki, and then we did the show and then we moved on to Valyrian and moved on to High Valyrian and all that stuff and then I feel like she ended up speaking English. But the creator of the language, I read [in] an article, said that I sucked at Dothraki. And I was like, 'What? Bro!' It's not real! It's not a real language! I can't suck at it because me saying it on the TV, that's how it goes. That's the language. I was so hurt, and then really pissed.
Considering how frequently Emilia Clarke had to speak Dothraki over the eight seasons of the show, who could blame her for feeling "really pissed" at reading the opinion that she sucked at the fictional language? She also makes a very good point. While there may be native speakers of Russian who have comments about her mastery (or lack thereof) of the language in Ponies, there is no real-life Dothraki civilization with a specific language. If Clarke wasn't nailing the ins and outs of the language, who would even know other than the creator?
That said, Game of Thrones linguist David J. Peterson got wind of Emilia Clarke's comments about what she read about her being bad at Dothraki, and responded in a statement to EW. He clarified:
Criticizing any imperfections in her Dothraki performance would be like criticizing Colin Firth for stuttering in The King's Speech. It would be entirely missing the point. In fact, grammatical and punctuation errors were built into many of her Dothraki lines — and these were included in the MP3s I recorded for her — for this very purpose. No, Emilia Clarke did a fine job with Dothraki, in that she was portraying a character who, through incredible hardship, is forced to learn a language she's never heard before and eventually becomes functionally fluent in the manner of a non-native speaker — and in a relatively short amount of time.
Unless Emilia Clarke responds to the statement, we may never know what exactly she read in the article she cited or how it was framed, but at least the linguist has gone on the record in 2026 to compliment her "fine job" with Dothraki. It does make sense that Daenerys would be written to not exactly be perfect at it right off the bat, but I have to agree with Emilia Clarke that when it comes to a fake language, nobody is actually going to know whether or not a character is good at it based on grammar, vocabulary, or phrasing.
If you want to revisit Clarke's days of speaking Dothraki, High Valyrian, and the Common Tongue, you can find every episode of Game of Thrones streaming with an HBO Max subscription now. As somebody who convinced herself to rewatch the Game of Thrones finale for the five-year anniversary, I'll say that Dany's big speech switching between the three languages is one of Clarke's finest moments, even if it happened in one of the show's most disliked episodes.
For more High Valyrian, you can check out Matt Smith and Emma D'Arcy's performances as royal Targaryens in House of the Dragon on HBO Max.
