In addition to the violence and gore shown on a weekly basis, the nudity in HBO’s “Game of Thrones” came in for a lot of criticism. After the series came to a controversial end in 2019, Emilia Clarke (who starred as Daenerys Targaryen in her breakout role) opened up about her early experiences on the show and how she assumed that all the nudity was essential to the story. “I’d come fresh from drama school and I approached it as a job,” she said on Dax Shepard’s podcast Armchair Expert. “Now I’m on a film set completely naked, with all of these people and I don’t know what I’m meant to do, and I don’t know what’s expected of me.”
Luckily for Clarke, she had a very understanding and protective scene partner during her early nude scenes: Jason Momoa, who played Khal Drogo on the series, regularly stood up for Clarke. “The scenes when I got to do them with Jason were wonderful, because he was like, ‘No sweetie, this isn’t okay!'” Clarke told Shepard. “It’s only now that I realize how fortunate I was with that, because that could have gone many, many, many different ways.” The whole experience made the actor “a lot more savvy” when it comes to filming scenes of an intimate nature. “I’ve had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up,'” she revealed. “And they’re like, ‘You don’t want to disappoint your Game of Thrones fans,’ and I’m like, ‘F*** you.'”
