Emilia Clarke has revealed that she “burst into tears” when her brother got her a Targaryen flag from the set of Game Of Thrones as a gift.
The actress, who played Daenerys Targaryen in the hit fantasy series from 2011 until it ended last year, said the gift meant so much to her because she failed to take any props from the set herself.
During an appearance on BBC Radio 2’s breakfast show, host Zoe Ball told Clarke that her former co-star Kit Harington had kept a stone statue of his character Jon Snow after the show ended.
Clarke said: “I was such a frustratingly good girl, I didn’t, I didn’t do anything.
“I abided by the rules, however… I’m just going to say this live on radio, my amazing brother who’s in the camera department and worked on the show as well, this Christmas gave me the best Christmas present ever.
“He had in one of the battle scenes – I think he’d got a mate of a mate of a mate – anyway, he got one of the Targaryen flags, so I opened it this Christmas and just burst into tears.
“I was literally like, ‘That’s going up pride of place’, because I keep asking Game Of Thrones, please can I have a wig, a coat? I had eight.”
Clarke, 33, said it feels “very freeing” for the programme to have ended, but that she does miss her character after playing her for nearly a decade.
She said: “It’s been really nice. I think my brain and my soul probably needed a bit of a break from it because it just kept going and getting bigger and bigger, and I could never quite see what it was because we were in it.
“I always used to say we got in this bunker for 10 years and then came out and was like, ‘Where are we, what’s happened?’
“And so it feels very freeing to be free, literally, of the show.”
She added: “That being said, Daenerys is very much a part of me. She literally is.”
Clarke, who recently appeared in festive film Last Christmas, will next star in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Playhouse Theatre in London, marking her West End debut.