In an interview with Variety, Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke revealed that she had watched speeches by real-life dictators like Adolf Hitler to prepare for one of the most crucial moments of nearly ten years of Daenerys Targaryen’s televised journey.
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As part of her role, Clarke has had a lot of fake languages to learn, including Dothraki and Valyrian, and said that she normally picked up difficult lines quite quickly, but put much effort to prepare for her final speech in High Valyrian.
“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. 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”, she said.
The actress told the magazine that she drilled herself tirelessly on the lines because she was concerned that she was going to “f*ck up”.
“I stayed up so late every night for like two months. I said it to my cooker, I said it to my fridge. I said it to all of Belfast out my window! Well, the window was closed because I didn’t want people to think that I was actually barking mad”, Clarke elaborated.
In fact, social media users say that Daenerys’ speech was “chillingly” reminiscent of Hitler’s, and said that Clarke nailed her intended performance:
I was watching her speech- looked over to my girlfriend and said "she's Hitler". So- I guess she nailed her intended performance.
— gasping for breath (@morey000) 21 мая 2019 г.
#GameOfThronesFinale not going to lie, despite what I said earlier about hating it, the visuals were great. Also, @emiliaclarke is a blessing to this world. We do not deserve her! Dany's speech was chillingly reminiscent in tone of ones I have seen of Hitler. Brilliant acting!
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi_18) 21 мая 2019 г.
I remember thinking at the time that the imagery, her speech and delivery was very much like Hitler and Nuremberg in 1935. Emelia Clarke was superb.
— Sloppy Brain Paste🇪🇺 (@BintyMcFrazzles) 22 мая 2019 г.
Clarke’s character – Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Protector of the Seven Kingdoms, the Mother of Dragons, the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Unburnt, the Breaker of Chains – gave a fiery speech in the show’s finale after her last dragon burnt King’s Landing to the ground.
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The much-anticipated episode drew big ratings and polarising reactions, ranging from pleased and shocked to frustrated and infuriated. Nearly 1.5 million fans have already signed a Change.org petition demanding that the final season be completely remade as creators of the show “have proven themselves to be woefully incompetent writers when they have no source materials (i.e. the books) to fall back on”.
