Emilia Clarke “shut down emotionally” after suffering multiple life-threatening brain aneurysms — and “convinced” herself she “was meant to die.”
The “Game of Thrones” alum detailed her near-fatal health battle on Wednesday’s “How to Fail” podcast episode.
The actress, 39, had surgery in 2011 and 2013 for aneurysms, which are “bulges or ballooning in the wall of a blood vessel,” per Mayo Clinic.
The second time around, the Emmy nominee had the “opposite experience” of feeling like she “survived” and was “great.”
Clarke, who felt she had “cheated death” and “wasn’t meant to be here,” recalled thinking, “This is going to come and get me.”
She recalled, “It became this thing where I just couldn’t look anyone in the eye. … It just cuts you off from the outside world because you’re walking around knowing that your body has failed you.
“Your brain has failed you. This thing that you know to be where your perception of yourself lies has failed you,” the “Secret Invasion” star continued. “And no one else can see it.”
After the health scares, Clarke became “really sensitive” to headaches, constantly becoming convinced it was “happening again.”
She once told her publicist she thought she was “going to die” — but went forward with an MTV interview anyway.
“There was no other option but to carry on,” Clarke recalled of her mindset at the time. “I was raised by a family that did not partake in self-pity.”
Looking back, she now understands she did ” not take care of” herself or give “grace” during her recovery.
Clarke went public with her aneurysms in a 2019 New Yorker essay.
The first, she revealed, caused a stroke and required emergency surgery — while the second led to a “failed” surgery and a “massive bleed.”
“The doctors made it plain that my chances of surviving were precarious if they didn’t operate again,” she recalled in the poignant piece. “This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way — through my skull.”
Clarke, who has since launched a SameYou charity inspired by her journey, called her recovery “gruesome” and revealed “bits of [her] skull had been replaced by titanium.”
In 2022, Clarke made headlines for telling BBC One’s “Sunday Morning” viewers that “quite a bit” of her brain is missing.
“The amount of my brain that is no longer usable — it’s remarkable that I am able to speak, sometimes articulately, and live my life completely normally with absolutely no repercussions,” she marveled during the 2022 sitdown.
Clarke referred to herself as being “in the really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that.”
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