Emilia Clarke studied videos of Hitler and other dictators to prepare for her big Game of Thrones speech

Variety

"I’ve had a lot of Dothraki, Valyrian, fake languages to learn and I’ve had a lot of speeches to give, but I put so much pressure on myself with this one," she says of her series finale speech in an interview with Variety. "Any actor will tell you the days on set are long and then you go home and do your homework, which is learning your lines for the next day. This is learning a fake language on top of that! It almost killed me. I normally pick up these things quite quickly, but this speech meant so much to me. I was so worried that I was going to f*ck it 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 I was actually barking mad." Clarke adds: "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.'"

ALSO

• The final words spoken on Game of Thrones was a joke about brothels
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren slam the final episodes: "This was written by men"
• Nikolaj Coster-Waldau proposes fans petition HBO for an Arya spinoff
• Read an oral history of Game of Thrones as told by its bit players
• Sophie Turner releases an image of her vaping in the dragonpit
• Kit Harington was in the dragonpit powdering Maisie Williams