Game of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke recently decided to stop taking selfies with fans after a man asked for one while she was crying during a panic attack.
“I was walking through an airport and I started having a panic attack brought on by complete exhaustion,” Emilia explained, adding, “I’m crying and this guy’s like, ‘Can I get a selfie?’ And I was like, ‘I can’t breathe, I’m really sorry...’ It was after a few moments like that where I was like, ‘I don’t know how to do this.’”
This doesn’t mean the 33-year-old actress is not fond of her fans; she is still open to the idea of signing for them.
“I will sign something,” she told Jessie Ware’s Table Manners podcast. “When you do that you have to have an interaction with that person, as opposed to someone just going, ‘Give us a selfie, goodbye’. “It turns into, ‘Right, what’s your name? Who am I making it out to?’ Then you have a chat and you’re actually having a human-to-human thing, as opposed to it being this thing that probably isn’t nice for them or you.”
This month, Emilia admitted she wanted to disappear when she suffered her second brain aneurysm. The actress experienced two health scares in 2011 and then in 2013 but she only went public with her ordeal this year; she was shattered that she had to go through the traumatic event while living in the public eye.
“I do feel like the brain haemorrhages are the literal, physical embodiment of what it is to be attacked on a social media, because I didn’t want to look anyone in the eye, and I didn’t want anyone to recognize me. I wanted to disappear completely, to wipe myself off the face of the earth, because I couldn’t handle the level of interaction. Because I felt totally laid bare, totally vulnerable, totally in pain,” she said.
