Emilia Clarke broke down as she tried to put her experiences on Game of Thrones into words after shooting her final scene as Daenerys Targaryen.
The actress decided to give a speech, thanking the cast and crew for an amazing journey on the show, but her emotions got the better of her and she just stood and sobbed.
"I started to do a little speech, not because I’m a pretentious actor, but because every time we said goodbye to a character, David (Benioff) and Dan (Weiss), the showrunners, would give us a gift and the crew would be around and everyone would stop and you'd sort of say a few words and it was really beautiful," she tells Harper's Bazaar.
"I got three words in before I just completely broke down. You just hold it in and you’re holding it in and you’re holding it in, and then I just burst into tears like a complete idiot. Then we cracked open the champagne, but it was then that I realized that alcohol is a depressant! So it was less a celebratory champagne, it was more kind of like, (sobbing), 'We did it! We got to the finish line!'"
Emilia will miss all the friends she made while shooting the fantasy series, but she's not sorry about leaving the grueling filming schedule behind: "Game of Thrones is probably the hardest shooting I’ll do, because it is so physical and you’re in a corset!" she explains. "You’ve got the physical places of where you are, the weather is so extreme, and the hours are really long and there’s so much tension in each character towards the end. There’s so much tension in the room, and you’re concentrating so hard. It’s strenuous."