Elizabeth Day

This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

I get it.

This episode of How to Fail is brought to you by Dove Whole Body Deodorant.

Welcome to How to Fail, the podcast that believes, as James Joyce once said, that failures are the portals of self-discovery.

Before we get into this episode, please do remember to like, follow, and subscribe so that you never miss a single conversation.

Emilia Clarke was three when she sat on her mother's lap on the front row of the London Palladium watching a production of Showboat that her sound engineer father had worked on.

She was, she recalled later, transfixed and set her heart on becoming an actor.

Almost 20 years later, her TV debut was a guest appearance on the BBC soap Doctors in 2009.

Then, at the age of 23, Clarke was cast as Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, in HBO's juggernaut fantasy series Game of Thrones.

She received four Emmy nominations across eight seasons and became internationally famous, going on to star in films including Terminator Genisys, Solo, A Star Wars Story and the romantic comedy Me Before You.

On stage, she won critical acclaim for her magnetic performance as Nina in The Seagull in the West End.

But the fact that she had been a complete unknown at the time of her Game of Thrones audition left Clarke feeling she had, in her words, imposter syndrome times a million.

It was not her only challenge.

In 2011, just after filming had wrapped on the debut season, she suffered the first of two life-threatening brain aneurysms, a shattering experience that later led to her setting up the charity Same You with her mother, Jenny.

Clarke's charity work in neurorehabilitation earned her an MBE in the 2024 honours list.

Now she returns to our screens in Ponies, a Cold War spy series on Sky and Now TV.

Clarke stars as one of the two US embassy secretaries in late 1970s Moscow who become CIA operatives after their husbands die in mysterious circumstances.

Still yet to turn 40, that happens later this year, Clarke's acting career has been one of notable highs.

But, she says, if there's anything else you can do, do that.