If her best-known character, Game of Thrones’ Daenerys Targaryen, is adored for being a strong-willed, fire-breathing leader with her eyes set on the Iron Throne, the real Emilia Clarke has a wise, older-sister quality about her. There’s no riding on dragons, because her feet are firmly on the ground.
Having spent a decade in the spotlight, the 32-year-old actor has learned how to navigate her way through the artifice of the film industry, which has now filtered into all of our lives via social media.
“I think that we can find our inner beauty by looking inwards and not outwards,” she explained to Miss Vogue. “Seriously. Now we’re really screwed because we’ve got the editing, we’ve got the shading, we’ve got all that bloody nonsense. They don’t look like that. Ain’t nobody look like that!”
As the actor who is also the face of Dolce & Gabbana’s The Only One fragrance, Emilia is keen to promote a transparency when it comes to the way she is presented. “Celebrities get professionals to work with them on their diet, exercise, hair and make-up, even Spanx – all of it. It’s not real. It’s all fake.”
Her desire for more transparency can be clearly seen in her own Instagram profile, now at almost 20 million followers. There you’ll find super-smiley selfies, photographs with her godchildren and long sweeping paragraphs thanking the team that get her red-carpet ready for events ranging from the Oscars to the Game of Thrones premieres.
It’s not just the level of editing we see celebrities doing that Emilia finds alarming, but also that is has filtered down to those that aren’t in the public eye.
“I struggle with the girl next door also editing their pictures,” Emilia continued. “It’s not right. Where is that human interaction? I think that the apps that make people airbrush themselves and look thinner or look clearer skinned should be banned. I don’t think this shit should be on the phone for young people. I do not agree with it, I do not like it, it doesn’t make me feel good. I don’t do it on my Instagram. I filter, sure, everybody’s got to filter! But ain’t no way that I’m going to retouch that stuff.”
As is to be expected, there have been times when Emilia has seen her image altered and her features have been barely recoginsable even to herself. “Back in the day, there were certain movie posters where I was like, ‘Hey guys, I ain’t got no DDs. I’m very happy with what I’ve got, and it’s not what you’ve put on that poster.’ But that was not the stuff that I’m doing right now.”
“My heart bleeds, because I struggled as a kid. I thought that what the girls looked like in magazines, on TV, in film, were real. And they’re not real. That’s why I think fashion can be fun. Lean into that. Lean into your body type. It’s not that only that body type can wear that, and only that body type can wear that. There’s nothing wrong with being tall and skinny, there’s nothing wrong with being an absolutely bone normal size 12 or being anything bigger than that. Nothing wrong with it.”
Like most of us, Emilia hopes for representation that is actually representative and inclusive. “Everybody’s their own thing. As long as you’re happy, it’s all good. We need less of it being that you’re either all the way over there or you’re all the way over there. Let’s have a little more normal. Where’s the middle ground? That’s your normal girl walking down the street. That is beautiful. I would love to see a fashion brand emerge that just did normal. The rise of the normal, please. Because that’s what we actually all look like.”
See, told you, excellent advice with a total grip on reality.
