After nearly a decade spent soaring through the skies of Westeros atop her beloved dragons, Emilia Clarke is drawing a firm line under her fantasy career. The British actress, best known for her role as Daenerys Targaryen—the iconic Mother of Dragons—on HBO’s Game of Thrones, has made it clear in a series of recent interviews that she’s ready to leave the genre, and her fire-breathing companions, firmly in the past.
In a candid conversation with The New York Times published on January 13, 2026, Clarke, now 39, reflected on the impact of her time on Game of Thrones as she promoted her latest project, the Cold War-era thriller Ponies, which premieres January 15 on Peacock. “You’re highly unlikely to see me get on a dragon, or even in the same frame as a dragon, ever again,” Clarke told the paper. It’s a sentiment she’s repeated to several outlets, signaling a definitive break from the genre that made her a household name.
Clarke’s declaration comes as HBO prepares to launch yet another spin-off, Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, this month, keeping the Game of Thrones universe alive and well. But for Clarke, whose portrayal of Daenerys earned her four Emmy nominations and a legion of devoted fans, the chapter is closed. According to AV Club, she has no intention of revisiting the world of dragons—sorry, Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion, your mother has officially moved on.
Her journey as Daenerys began in 2011, when Clarke, then just 22 and in only her third professional acting role, was cast as the exiled Targaryen princess with a destiny to reclaim the Iron Throne. The role catapulted her to international fame, but it also brought with it immense pressure and personal challenges. In a revealing interview with The Daily Beast, Clarke shared that the end of Game of Thrones triggered a “full mental breakdown.” She explained, “It was the first time in my professional life that I stopped. I had a full mental breakdown. It was almost as if the timing of the pandemic was bang on.” The global pause forced her to confront questions about her career and personal identity that she’d long pushed aside.
Looking back, Clarke admitted that the whirlwind of her early career left little room for reflection. “There was never any time to stop and consider the meaning of it,” she told The Daily Beast. “So much of my career didn’t reflect my taste, I just sort of shot out of a cannon.” The experience of playing Daenerys was all-consuming, and Clarke said it would take her until her nineties to truly understand what Game of Thrones meant to her. “I have too many emotional reactions for what Emilia, herself, was experiencing at that moment in time when we were filming it. You know what I mean? I watch a scene and I go, ‘Oh, that was when [such and such] happened,’ which you didn’t see on screen. And I think there’s something timely about the prequels and the continuation of the Game of Thrones story coming about now. I look at it and I’m like, ‘Wow, yeah.’ So I see it with only peace,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in a previous interview.
Clarke’s time on Game of Thrones wasn’t just marked by professional highs. She survived two life-threatening brain aneurysms in 2011 and 2013, an ordeal she described in a 2019 essay for The New Yorker. Filming the show’s second season, she wrote, was nearly unbearable: “If I am truly being honest, every minute of every day I thought I was going to die.” Despite these struggles, she remained fiercely committed to her craft and the character she’d helped bring to life.
Yet it was the show’s controversial final season that left perhaps the deepest mark. As Daenerys transformed into the Mad Queen, burning King’s Landing and ultimately meeting her own violent end, fans erupted in outrage over what many saw as a rushed and unsatisfying conclusion. Clarke herself was blindsided by the scripts. “What, what, what, WHAT!?” she recalled to Entertainment Weekly about her reaction to Daenerys’s death. “Because it comes out of fucking nowhere. I’m flabbergasted. Absolutely never saw that coming. I cried. And I went for a walk. I walked out of the house and took my keys and phone and walked back with blisters on my feet. I didn’t come back for five hours. I’m like, ‘How am I going to do this?’”
The emotional toll was so great that Clarke reached out to her family for support. “I called my mom and [told her], ‘I read the scripts and I don’t want to tell you what happens but can you just talk me off this ledge? It really messed me up,’” she said. “And then I asked my mom and brother really weird questions. They were like: ‘What are you asking us this for? What do you mean do I think Daenerys is a good person? Why are you asking us that question? Why do you care what people think of Daenerys? Are you okay?’”
Viewers weren’t the only ones stunned by the sudden shift in Daenerys’s character. Clarke told The Sunday Times in 2020 she was frustrated that the show prioritized spectacle over character development in its final stretch. Still, she’s since made peace with the ending, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “I really have. I really, really, really have.”
Her empathy for disappointed fans remains. “I get why people are pissed,” Clarke told MTV. “I totally get it. But, me being the actor, you can’t do justice to the character that you poured your blood, sweat, and tears into for a decade without getting on the same page. So like, I’m not just going to be there being like, ‘Fine, I’ll do the scene, whatever. I’m so pissed.’ You have to turn up.”
The backlash to the finale was so intense that a petition calling for HBO to remake the final season gained traction online—a move that angered her co-star Kit Harrington, who told The New York Times the campaign “genuinely angered me.” Despite the ongoing debates and the ever-expanding Game of Thrones franchise, Clarke is choosing her own path forward. She’s stepping into new genres, new roles, and, as she put it, seeking “some autonomy over my choices, my work.”
With Ponies set to mark her return to leading a television series, Clarke is embracing the next phase of her career with a sense of clarity and resolve. The dragons may be gone, but Emilia Clarke’s story is far from over.
