Emilia Clarke: 'Hospitals will fix your brain, but the recovery process will save you'

Emilia Clarke said she “struggled physically with the workload” while filming for Game of Thrones after suffering two brain injuries – but she felt too “ashamed” to ask for help.

The actor spoke in parliament on Wednesday (24 July) to celebrate the partnership between her charity SameYou and Big Issue Recruit, which will work together to support brain injury survivors back into work.

Emilia suffered two brain injuries in her mid-20s. She launched SameYou with her mother Jenny in 2019 to support other survivors through their mental health recovery process. 

• Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke: ‘Surviving brain injuries gave me a fire to keep going’
• Emilia Clarke feared being fired from Game of Thrones after brain injury

“Once you have a brain injury, if you are lucky enough to survive it, what you are left with can alter the rest of your life,” the 37-year-old said.

“I’m of the belief that if I were to ask anyone in this room where they think their souls, personalities, traits, talents, skill and imagination live, it would be in their brains. It’s where the most human part of you lives. So what happens when that fails you? It leaves a seismic indent in how you see yourself.”

Emilia recently spoke to the Big Issue about the mental health impact of brain injuries, and her fear of being fired from Game of Thrones in the immediate aftermath.

“Being a child of two self-confessed workaholics, it was no surprise that from a very young age – I think I was two when I announced I wanted to be an actor – my dreams always focused on just that, although I do think they had hoped my career goals would have been a little more reliable,” Emilia said in parliament.

“When I landed the role of my dreams in Game of Thrones a year after drama school, I wasn’t the only one breathing a sigh of relief. Because of the professionalism I saw growing up, I’m not afraid of a hard day’s work, and Game of Thrones certainly gave me that. The hours were long and the imposter syndrome was inevitable. How had I been given such an opportunity at such a young age?”

She added: “I did everything in my power not to mess it up. Then I had my first brain haemorrhage a month after wrapping season one and my entire world flipped upside down. All my diligence at making sure I was doing my job was suddenly taken out of my control. If I couldn’t work, if I couldn’t live out my dreams, then who was I? Yes, that was a time in my young life when working didn’t mean keeping up with the mortgage, but it did mean identity.”

Emilia’s second brain injury was worse, and it took an even greater toll on her mental health. 

“I felt so ashamed at being broken, so desperate at being unreliable, so terrified that everyone could see how this meant I was in a job that I couldn’t do,” she said. “All the rest of filming, I struggled physically with the workload but I was so determined not to let anyone know I might need help.”

She is far from alone. Around 1.3 million people in the UK are living with the effects of a long-term brain injury but a lack of awareness means employers often fail to provide enough support.  

Polling by Big Issue Group and SameYou shows that over a third of survivors felt they returned to work too soon after a brain injury, and nearly as many felt pressure from their employer to do so.

Scott and Hayley Pearshouse, a couple who also spoke at the event, described how their lives changed after Scott had a brain injury. Both of them were forced to give up work.

“When Scott’s accident happened, it changed my life as well,” Hayley said. “It changed my career, my social circles, my priorities. My whole world changed. 

“Overnight, I couldn’t relate to anyone anymore. I couldn’t relate to my friends or my family. Their problems seemed so far from what our problems were, and those social circles got smaller because the recovery took so long.”

But she had no choice but to care for Scott, because she loved him. “No one could care for him the way I could care for him, because I loved him. That was the reason. It was an impossible scenario, but you do it because you would never let anyone else care for him, because they couldn’t do the good job that you would,” Hayley said.

Emilia said that “hospitals will fix you, but the recovery process is the thing that will save you”. She was fortunate to have family around her for support, and HBO were “kind and supportive”, but she worries for others who are not surrounded by such compassion.

“I fundamentally was not alone,” she says. “So what if someone is? What if someone already on the breadline has a brain injury that takes them out of the workplace? It’s no surprise how quickly that person can find themself homeless.”

Lord John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue, said that the partnership with SameYou is a “historic” development.

“We started on the streets of the West End of London 33 years ago, dealing exclusively with the problems of homelessness, with the problems of people who were disenfranchised, who were harming themselves and being harmed. Many of these people were ex-members of the armed forces,” Bird said. “They were made up of people who had been in care in the community. Many of them had brain injuries.

“For the last 10 years, I’ve been mending broken clocks. For the next 10 or 20 years, I’m going to try to stop the clocks breaking. But at the same time, if I can act in an emergency, whether it’s a health emergency, a mental health emergency, an economic emergency, or a personal emergency, I want to do that. I want to do two things. I want to prevent and I want to offer a Rolls-Royce service to anybody who has fallen into need around health and any other issues.”

Big Issue Recruit is a specialist job service which supports people with barriers to work and helps them get into employment with the help of job coaches. 

Shak Dean, a job coach at Big Issue Recruit, said: “It’s about understanding someone’s story and understanding what the boundaries are preventing them from moving on and actually having the life they want. 

“We have a conversation, go through steps and actions to see what is going on and where are they at. What is standing in their way of achieving those goals? And from there, we look at how we can help them navigate this and get them into employment, education, or whatever it might be. It’s not the same for any two people.”

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.