Cute Babe 009: Emilia Clarke

Anyone who has watched HBO’s “Game of Thrones” series on TV is going to know who Emilia Clarke is. Well all the red blooded males will anyway.

Emilia plays the amazing Princess Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, daughter of the ‘mad King’ Aerys Targaryen, and rightful blood-line heir to the Iron Throne. She plays the part brilliantly.

While almost all of the actors in the Game of Thrones series are a delight to watch and savour, to my thinking Emilia’s acting is second only to Peter Dinkage who plays the dwarf Lord Tyrion Lannister.

The Book of Knowledge, otherwise referred to as Wikipedia, tells us that Emilia was born in 1987 making her 25-ish, depending on which side of July she was born. She was born in Berkshire, England. It seems her interest in acting took hold at the very young age of three after being taken to see the a stage production of the musical Show Boat. She studied acting at the Drama Centre London and graduated in 2009.

From front on Emilia can sometimes looks at little like Jennifer Lawrence from The Hunger Games. In one article I came across they said that at one stage Emilia was considered for the lead role in The Hunger Games. However once she is in her Game of Thrones costume with the stark white wig on—that is supposed to made from human hair and cost $7,000 to have made as required—she looks nothing like Jennifer Lawrence. Also any similarities to Jennifer Lawrence disappear once Emilia moves even slightly into profile.

In the interview for the role Emilia was told that there were three nude scenes required in season one and she was asked if this would be a problem for her. Fortunately for half the population of the world (all the men) she told the producers she would be okay with doing the required nude scenes.

Emilia is short. Wikipedia has her at 5’2” but some other sites have her at 5’1” and over at CelebHeights they have her at 5’0”. One article I came across even had her down as low as 4’11”. So in some of the scenes in the series they have to resort to little tricks to make her appear a bit taller including having her wear 4” heels in some shots where they do not shoot her full-length or she is wearing ground hugging skirts or wraps.

I might have to watch Series One again and see if I can pick out those scenes featuring Emilia where she is wearing hidden heels to give her height.

I have started ‘reading’ the third book of the series and I can tell you that the Mother of Dragons becomes even more ‘kick ass’ in the next series. I am about half way through my audible version of book three and Princess Daenerys now has a formidable army assembled as she plots her way to regaining the Iron Throne.

For a little while there was some doubt that Season 3 of Game of Thrones would actually get into production. HBO were very concerned (code for “pissed off”) about the massive degree of pirating of Season 2.  Quite understandable really. HBO has paid out gobs of hard cash to produce the series hoping in return, obviously, to make some kind of decent profit from it. Every illegal download impacts their profit either because other networks are less likely to pay them to re-broadcast it (because advertisers will assume less people are going to watch it) or, when the DVD/Blu-ray copies are released, far less people are likely to buy a copy for home.

Season 2 of Game of Thrones currently holds the record as the most illegally downloaded TV series in 2012. Somewhat embarrassingly Australians were named as the worst offenders in downloading pirated copies of Season 2.

Due to the nature of torrent downloading it is obviously hard for anyone to get accurate statistics relating to how many copies of Season 2 of Game of Thrones were ‘stolen’ over the Internet. Download estimates range from 3.5 million to 6 million downloads world-wide of each episode. But it does not stop after the download. On top of this is what is known as the friend and relative re-share factor.

For anyone interested in such things the Number One most pirated TV series in 2011 was Dexter (according to TorrentFreak, here).

Fortunately, as far as I can work out, season three is in production. Unlike seasons one and two, which more or less cover the exact contents of books one and two, because there is so much that happens in book three season three is only going to cover the first half of the third book. Which I guess means that season four, assuming it is made, will cover the second half of book three.

Okay. I am just about out of things to say about Emilia or the Game of Thrones.

Just one more picture of Emilia before I close.

Note: The two GQ (Gentleman’s Quarterly) related pictures (the one at the very top of the page and the one at right) will take you to the UK GQ site and the article relating to Emilia Clarke.

The News.com.au image will take you to that article at News.com.