Years ago, when I was a grad student, I worked at an ice cream shop in Oxford called George & Davis'. Students from Teddies, one of the local private schools just up the road, used to come in all the time. One of them was Emilia Clarke.
She's twenty-eight now, one of the stars of Game of Thrones, the mother not just of dragons but of John Connor in the latest Terminator movie, and Esquire's Sexiest Woman Alive. It's Sunday lunchtime. I was supposed to be taking my kids to Legoland. But I'm not—I'm going to interview Emilia.
My taxi pulls up at a house in Hampstead, an inner London suburb. Academics and writers used to live there. Now only bankers and lawyers and movie stars can afford it—you hear a lot of American accents on the street. Emilia's house is part of a beautiful Georgian "terrace" (English for a section of row houses) with long front lawns, pretty pastel-colored stucco walls, big windows you can step out of. It's just across the road from Hampstead Heath: eight hundred acres of hills, hedgerows, and countryside in the middle of London.
The weather is classic English summer's day. It rained the night before, it will rain later that evening, but at lunchtime there's a kind of chilly truce and the overcast sky has a certain brightness to it. Emilia comes out of the house to meet me—the buzzer isn't working, and she shouts instructions apologetically from the doorstep as I fumble with the garden gate. She's wearing dark jeans and low cowboy boots and a cloud-soft and cloud-colored cashmere top.
"I'm sorry if I'm shouting," she tells me. "I was at a Metallica concert last night."
The members of Metallica turn out to be huge fans of Game of Thrones, so they comped some of the cast a few tickets. If you're Emilia Clarke, these kinds of things keep happening to you. Last month she toured the DMZ between North and South Korea with Arnold Schwarzenegger to promote Terminator Genisys (out on DVD in November). Next week she's accepting the Woman of the Year award from GQ. And today she has to hang out with a middle-aged, slightly etiolated Texan she's never met, who is supposed to take her to Crystal Palace to play something called Game of Phones—a Thrones-flavored quiz and treasure hunt put on by a social-networking company called Thinking Bob. It's aimed at people who want to make new friends in a strange new city.
So far as I can tell, Emilia doesn't really need more friends. There's also the worry that she might get mobbed, which is why she's going in disguise. I'm supposed to provide the disguise. It's possible that I'm supposed to be the protection, too.
I brought along three disguises: a brown fedora I haven't worn since college; a glittery, vaguely ethnic shawl; and an Oklahoma City Thunder cap, bright blue, with the kind of brim that sticks up. (I live in London now, but I'm from Austin originally; Kevin Durant is the man.) She picks the cap and my wife's old sunglasses, tortoiseshell-rimmed and pointy at the edges. I don't know what she looks like. She looks great.
On the cab ride over, Emilia explains that she wasn't anyone's "favorite" at the Drama Centre, where she studied, but she worked hard—"I was a keen bean." After graduating, she did a couple of episodes of Doctors (a long-running British daytime soap) and starred in some movie for a sci-fi channel that she still hasn't seen. By this point she was living with friends and working three jobs, at a bar, at a call center, and—she didn't tell me the third one. But she did say that a friend of hers walked in once and saw her face, the face you make when you don't know people are watching. It had a scowl on it. She'd given herself a year to make it in acting and she hadn't.
"And then my agent calls me up and says, 'Did you ever go up for Game of Thrones?' " The original pilot for the show had already been shot but nobody was happy with it, so HBO was digging back into the casting pile to try and save it. This is where Emilia came in. "My agent told the casting director, 'I know that the breakdown for this character is tall and willowy and blonde. I know she's short and round and brown, but I'd like you to see her.' "
