For the first time since “Game of Thrones” ended in 2019, Emilia Clarke is playing the lead in a television series. In the Cold War-era drama “Ponies,” which begins airing Thursday on Peacock, Clarke stars as Bea, the wife of an intelligence agent who abruptly becomes a spy herself.
But this time, it feels different. In fact, Clarke said in an interview in London last month, back when she was playing Daenerys Targaryen in “Game of Thrones,” she didn’t really have time to reflect on how the experience felt at all. It was only her third professional role, and, at 22, it made her one of the most famous actors in the world.
“There was never any time to stop and consider the meaning of it,” she said. “I never had the foresight to think, ‘You’re going want to take a minute.’”
Since “Game of Thrones” finished, Clarke, now 39, has starred as Nina in a stage production of “The Seagull” in London, her hometown, and appeared in movies in a wide variety of genres: romcoms, a Christmas movie, sci-fi, a children’s film. No more fantasy, though: She’s finished with that. “You’re highly unlikely to see me get on a dragon, or even in the same frame as a dragon, ever again,” she said.
She added that she knew that her new show would be different from “Game of Thrones” when the “Ponies” showrunners, Susanna Fogel and David Iserson, gave her the choice of two main characters she could play: Bea, or her counterpart, Twila, another C.I.A. widow turned agent.
“I felt like they were giving me a voice,” Clarke said, “which doesn’t always happen.”
Still, signing on for another television series was daunting.
“I was definitely, like” — her eyebrows shot up, pantomiming panic — “a lead in a TV show? I know what that commitment feels like.” When she took the role in “Game of Thrones,” she hadn’t guessed that it would be such a hit, she said, or that it would dominate her working life for nine years.
Her last duty for the show was the 2019 Emmys, shortly before the coronavirus pandemic brought life to a standstill. “It was the first time in my professional life that I stopped,” she said. “I had a full mental breakdown. It was almost as if the timing of the pandemic was bang on.”
She had plenty to process. Not only the astronomic fame that “Game of Thrones” thrust upon her, but the death of her father in 2016 and two brain hemorrhages she suffered, in 2011 and 2013, which she was lucky to survive.
Although the pandemic was awful, she said, in some ways she was grateful that it happened. “It forced me to answer some questions I probably could have put off answering for another 10 years,” Clarke said.
One of those questions was what she wants out of her working life. It took her a long time after “Game of Thrones,” she said, “to realize that I could try and get some autonomy over my choices, my work. So much of my career didn’t reflect my taste, I just sort of shot out of a cannon.”
As a young British actress seeking work in Hollywood, she said, “No is not in your vocabulary. You just say yes.” Now, she said, she wants to come out from the shadow of other people’s expectations and take things into her own hands.
The same could be said of Bea, her character in “Ponies.” At the start of the series, Bea is neurotic college graduate turned stay-at-home wife of an American intelligence agent posted in 1970s Moscow: a “person of no interest,” or “PONI” in spy parlance. When her husband dies in a mysterious plane crash, she persuades the C.I.A. to take her on as an operative instead. Suddenly, she has agency.
Clarke said she had toyed for a while with the idea of playing Twila, the wilder and louder-mouthed of the two women, but she knew, really, that she was “obviously Bea.”
Fogel, the showrunner, said she remembered thinking before she sent Clarke the script that this might be the case. “She’s like a smart, thoughtful, Type A student, nerdy person, in the body of an ingénue movie star celebrity,” Fogel said. “So we thought she might actually really connect with this role of a of a try-hard Wellesley grad who finds herself in this high-stakes situation.”
Clarke is also an executive producer on “Ponies.” During the shoot, she said, she had “never felt so deeply invested in making sure that people were happy, making sure that we were having a nice time.”
Haley Lu Richardson, who plays Twila, said that while she was on-set, she mentioned offhand to Clarke one day that she was craving two particular salads from Erewhon, the upscale grocery chain. The next day, Richardson recalled, she came into her trailer to find that Clarke had made them for her from scratch.
“She had probably a seven-hour turnaround to sleep and study and get back to set,” Richardson said. “It seems unreal that a person is like that,” she said, adding that Clarke’s generosity seemed innate and came from her “hope of a real connection” with others.
Clarke described herself as being “absolutely hell bent” on living like a “normal” person so that fame doesn’t get in the way of making those connections. Jamie Lloyd, the British theater-maker who directed Clarke in “The Seagull,” recalled meeting her for the first time in a coffee shop, without any assistants or security, despite her enormous fame. “She just turned up,” he said. “She’s so sort of ordinary, and immensely likable.”
Feeling ordinary can be hard, though, Clarke said. “I never get to meet someone for the first time,” she said, “because they’re not being themselves. There’s just always this other thing in the way of interactions.”
That disappoints her, she said, because what drives her, in life and work, is collaboration. “I live for people,” she said, and “it can be really frustrating, because all my job is communicating. And the only time I get to do that is when I’m being someone else.”
The interview took place at a studio where Clarke had just finished a shoot for the photographs to accompany this article.
Clarke had brought some spiced lamb rolls that she had baked for all those present, and as she gathered her things to leave at the end, her assistant informed her that all of them were gone.
“Yes!” Clarke said, throwing her hands in the air. “That makes me so happy.”
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