Emilia Clarke Said She Prepared for Daenerys' Rally Speech by Watching Videos of Hitler and Other Dictators
Warning: Some spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones' final episode.
Emilia Clarke spoke a little more about the incredible care she put into performing Daenerys' last scenes. In the case of the speech that Daenerys gives her assembled army on the steps of the Red Keep in both of Dothraki and Valyrian (two of Game of Thrones's fake languages), Clarke told Variety that she did some pretty dark research to figure out how to play it, and it involved studying videos of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
"In giving all these speeches in fake languages, I watched a lot of videos of-now it seems funny-dictators and powerful leaders speaking a different language to see if I could understand what they were saying without knowing the language," she said. "And you can! You absolutely can understand what Hitler’s f*cking saying, these single-focus orators speaking a foreign language. So I thought, 'If I can believe every single word I’m saying, the audience won’t need to be looking at the subtitles too much.'"
Clarke admitted that watching the finale made her feel more numb than she expected. "It’s that kind of thing where it’s so big, you feel quite numb to it," she said. "We’ve been saying goodbye to it for a while. The last two seasons were sort of like, 'Oh, the end is coming. It’s coming!' Because it’s not 'Cheers.' The whole show is building toward winter coming. Every day you’re at work, you’re preparing for this to end in some massive way. We’ve been building up to it for so long, and then you wrap, other people wrap, the show finishes, but then you’ve got the first episode of the last season, the biggest episode of the last season, the last episode of the last season-it’s been a lot. Nothing prepared me to feel so numb when I was watching the absolute end."
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